deleted windows old

[Marytheknees]

hello I  deleted windows old  File today  from  C drive. i  installed recuva free ran it  but have no Idea whic  one to  check to find or restore it

 

[Guest johnccleaner]

You'd probably want to start by clicking the "Path" label, as this will sort files by the path that they previously occupied, which will hopefully allow you to find the files that were previously in C:\Windows.old. It is possible, however, that some or all of the files will not be present in this folder due to their Path attribute being damaged, at which point they would instead be in C:\?\ (in this list) along with all other files whose Path attribute cannot be read.

You would also want to click Switch to Advanced Mode > Options > Actions > check "Restore folder structure" as that will allow the selected files to be recovered to the correct place (relative to where you tell it to recover - e.g. if you recover to D:\recovery, then the files would go into D:\Recovery\Windows.old and so on).

Please also make sure that you do not recover to the same media that you are attempting to recover from, as it is very likely, especially in a large recovery situation like this, that it would cause more of the data to be damaged or overwritten.

It is, unfortunately, unlikely that restoring the Windows.old folder will be successful, however. For you to be able to revert back to this version, every file would need to be recovered, in the correct place, and entirely undamaged, which is not likely. If it is critical that you revert to that older version, I would suggest looking into the services of a reliable data recovery service to ensure the best chances of all of this data being recovered as needed for the revert. (Recuva would be more suitable to smaller cases, or ones where any individual file is not critical to success, e.g. recovering a large number of photos.)

[Augeas]

To everything that John said, I would ask why do you need to recover this folder? Is there a chance that you would revert to a previous version?

Windows old is huge (10 gb+) and probably contains many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of files. Any attempt to recover it is the definition of optimistic.