When I say 'useful' I mean files that one would normally want to recover (pics, vids, documents, ppt etc)
I'm trying to recover some videos I accidentally deleted a month ago and for some reason it's more troublesome than expected.
The files were on a HDD partition separate from my system stuff (I use ssd for windows and save stuff to a different partition on the HDD. That partition I deleted the files from hasn't been modified since.)
I've used Recuva in the past before and it has worked really well; it finds lots of files surprisingly even with file names.
This time it just finds useless stuff like .pak files or xml files, basically most of the files are below 100kb. I've ran file recovery on this drive in the past and it's shown me great results before. Since I hardly use the HDD I could files/documents going back years.
So I attempted using the other partitions (on the same HDD), and same results! Though one of them found a few videos deleted back in 2012ish... so I test recovered and those files won't play. Strange. I checked extensions/codecs no luck, even used VLC.
Then I tried intentionally deleting files and running file recovery to see if everything works. It doesn't find it! Even with various file types (pictures, program files).
I'm just going to use cliffs for what I've tried since this post could get quite long.
- glary undelete - same results as recuva except found more useless files
- photorec I had difficulty with the dos like interface but I eventually got to the part where it lists files and boy were there a lot but couldn't find anything useful (as in actual videos).
- Easeus surprisingly found some filenames of videos. Not many but a few which is better than the others. Tried recovering and doesn't work. I checked extensions
- disk drill - meh
- I then put the HDD into new computer (win7 before, win 10 now) and tried using file recovery on win 10. No difference.
With each software I did test deletes and it didn't pick up anything.
So far I conclude it's not anything wrong with the software itself. And since it's consistent results with my test deletes, it wouldn't be fair to say there's just 0 data to recover on that partition. When I previously had used Recuva (back when successful) it at leats showed me a bunch of files with weird names but had the right file sizes. Not now though.
I think it could be a silly mistake like a setting I need to tweak on my OS. I don't know guys, I'm stumped. Any ideas?
