Can I speed up Recuva Deep Scan by changing process priority?

[Catclaw]

Hi!

I hope you're doing well.
I had an accident with one of my RAID-0 arrays yesterday, as one of the HDD's heads crashed, scratching the surface of one of the internal disks. (I opened it in my university's lab clean-room today, as it made clicking sounds, and I thought I could fix it since I had a spare drive of the same model - and my idea was to swap the heads - till I opened up the disk, and well... Imagine... What a mess...)

Anyway, I'm always cautious, and I always back up my files.
I had a complete backup of the files on the crashed RAID array saved on a 10 TB SATA disk, so usually, I wouldn't care much and just plug in a new disk and recreate the array.
However, this time, I deleted my backup temporarily (before the crash) as I was running out of space. One of my servers disk was showing SMART errors during boot, so I made a copy of those files too - to the same disk (before deleting the backup, so nothing is overwritten).
I deleted the backup, as the RAID array showed no signs of error (yet), to create some free space, as I planned to copy the files from another server, too. Then suddenly I heard this clicking sound coming from my computer and I panicked and turned off the computer by cutting the power to the power supply.
I booted up my computer again, and the first thing I saw was an error message during the BIOS post that one of my RAID arrays had failed. I have 6 RAID arrays, so I didn't know which one till Windows finally booted. The failed array was my storage space for everything from my desktop, my pictures, documents, videos and pretty much everything important.
I'm studying journalism, and I was writing my essay for this semester's last exam, and I've hundreds of other files, like e-books (PDF), videos (MP4) and recorded interviews (MP3) that are extremely important for this essay, when all this happened. This is like the worst nightmare ever!

I'm now trying to recover the deleted files, and as fast scan didn't find any of those files, I switched to advanced mode with deep scan. (...And, yes, I've been in setting, turning on almost all options.)
The first 10% took about 4 hours, and the ETA showed 20 hours left - but that was yesterday.
The deep scan has been, well, scanning since then, and the 20-hour ETA is now 2 days!
The problem is that I don't have 2 days - I have to finish my essay before Friday next week.

I have a dual-socket Intel motherboard with 2 Xeon CPUs (56 cores total) and 128 GB RAM, and the SATA disk I'm trying to recover from is a high-performance server disk which is capable of ~250 MB/s read/write speed. My OS is Windows 11 Enterprise and boots off an M.2 NVMe disk. (The virtual memory is also on a second M.2 NVMe disk - but as I have 128 GB RAM, it's barely used.)
Recuva is now only using 2-4% of the disk performance? There are no bad sectors that could potentially slow down the scan process? (The disk is only 4-5 months old.)
When the deep scan started, the read speed was around ~180-190 MB/s, but now, it's around 9-10 MB/s?
Can I speed up the scan process by changing the process priority to high or Realtime? Recuva is only using ~2% of my CPUs.
Is there ANYTHING I can do to speed up the deep scan?

(One more thing: Recuva detects Windows 11 as Windows 10? Why is that?)

Thank you in advance.

PS. The attached screenshot might look strange on some screens, as I have HDR turned on, and using 12 bpc color depth instead of the usual 8.

[nukecad]

A 10TB disc is a lot to scan and so it's going to take a long time whatever you do.

It's one of the issues Home users have to get used to now we are using much larger capacity drives than we used to do, any kind of whole drive scan is going to take longer to complete simply because there is a lot more to be scanned.

I don't know of any way you could speed that up in Recuva itself, except possibly by changing/reducing the filetypes to scan for.

If you give Recuva a higher run priority in Windows then that might help, but might not as the drive access/read speed is probably the limiting factor.

https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-set-program-priority/

Larger drives can be convinient, but if/when they have a problem it's consequently a larger problem than if the data had been on multiple smaller drives.
There is an old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket.

(Windows 11 didn't exist last time that Recuva had/needed a functional update, so it will recognise it as Win 10. It doesn't matter though, it's the disk you are interested in not the Windows version).

[Catclaw]

On 08/04/2024 at 11:00, nukecad said:

A 10TB disc is a lot to scan and so it's going to take a long time whatever you do.

It's one of the issues Home users have to get used to now we are using much larger capacity drives than we used to do, any kind of whole drive scan is going to take longer to complete simply because there is a lot more to be scanned.

I don't know of any way you could speed that up in Recuva itself, except possibly by changing/reducing the filetypes to scan for.

If you give Recuva a higher run priority in Windows then that might help, but might not as the drive access/read speed is probably the limiting factor.

https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-11-set-program-priority/

Larger drives can be convinient, but if/when they have a problem it's consequently a larger problem than if the data had been on multiple smaller drives.
There is an old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket.

(Windows 11 didn't exist last time that Recuva had/needed a functional update, so it will recognise it as Win 10. It doesn't matter though, it's the disk you are interested in not the Windows version).

Thank you for clarifying the details, as I was very nervous and didn't dare to change Recuva process priority - but it did actually speed up the recovery.
When I changed the priority to "Realtime", the reading speed went from ~9-10 MB/s back to ~180 MB/s.
However, despite I didn't write anything to the disk after deleting my backup, Recuva couldn't restore the the paths, nor the filenames of the deleted files.
I was able to recover ~99,300 files (Word documents, PDF files, and MOV/MP3/MP4 files) and all the filenames were random numbers like [453474].ext and it took me a while to find some of the files I was looking for - but not all of them.
Recuva found ~3.5 million files, but whatever I do, it's "ignoring" 99.9%. Why is that?
Is it possible to at least see which files are "ignored" and why?

I haven't restarted my OS since Recuva finished scanning the 10 TB disk, and only used hibernation.
My motherboard also support how swap, so I take the disk offline every time before hibernating, and reconnect it after powering up again. 

I'm well aware of the risks of using RAID-0, and "putting all my eggs in one basket", and that's why I have 10 servers (Dell PowerEdge R-series) configured as NAS backup servers, using RAID-5 configuration.
The problem is that HDDs have a short lifespans, and sometimes I have to replace a disk - which is why all this happened.
I'll, of course, be much more careful from now on.

 

[nukecad]

Very interesting about the change of process priority speeding things up, and by that much too.
Thanks for letting us know, and I sure others may be trying it in future.

"Restore Folder Structure" (or attempt to) is an option in the advanced settings, see the screenshot below.

Yes the filenames are usually randoms, it is a bit of a pain but most people are usually just happy to get their 'lost' files back and rename them.

Ignored files may be system files, 0-bytes files, non-deleted files, etc. Stuff that you aren't usually looking to recover.
Again there are options in the settings if you want to include scanning for those.

I originally attached this screenshot when answering a question about scanning for non-deleted files on a crashed/reformatted disk, but it shows those other options too so I'll use it again rather than attaching a new one.