Folder recovery? W10

[nuyorican]

I accidentally deleted a large folder full of important stuff. I got the ‘this folder is too big do you want to permanently delete it?’ Dialogue, to which I clicked yes. Thinking I had it on another drive.

Anyway, trying to get it back. I used EaseUs Recuva which finds all the individual files in the folder but not the folder or sub folders. It recovered them but they appear to be corrupted.

Any other free programs to try? Preferably that will recover the folder tree?

Cheers

[sgrimshaw]

So who's going to be the first to mention the "B" word?

When you say you have tried EaseUS Recuva, do you mean EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro?

If they're important files "free" shouldn't really come into it.

[Captain_Morgan]

There are two kinds of people.

Those folk who haven’t dealt with data recovery yet & those who do backups

[nuyorican]

No. I tried the free version first to see if it worked. Bonkers I know. Will check the paid for version to see if that will reinstate folders if that's what you're saying. Cheers.

No need for anyone to mention 'the B word'. It's done now, the horse has bolted. It's about as helpful as posters who reply to a parking charge/speeding fine thread with: "well you shouldn't have parked there/drove over the speed limit...".

I know all about the B word. Having backed up regularly. But this was just the result of a mistake, late night moving lots of files around that are all similar looking...

[Mr Pointy]

Do you have the "Restore Folder Structure" box ticked?

https://support.ccleaner.com/s/article/recovering-...
https://support.ccleaner.com/s/article/recuva-opti...

[nuyorican]

Mr Pointy said:

Do you have the "Restore Folder Structure" box ticked?

https://support.ccleaner.com/s/article/recovering-...
https://support.ccleaner.com/s/article/recuva-opti...

Hmm, didn't see that option. I'll check again. Thank you.

Looks like you can't see the main GUI/options until it's scanned again so might be some time. Possibly a limitation of the free version to not save scans. No matter. Fingers crossed.

[speedyman]

If you have installed any data recovery software or saved any new files to the same disk then you may have already overwriten the data you "deleted". Only the file header gets changed when you delete a file. The file header contains information about what areas of the disk are being used. File recovery attempts to restore the headers and verify the file integrity.

[nuyorican]

Thanks.

Well I got them all back and in the correct folders etc, thanks to the previous posters recommendation.

Sadly, the files still can't be read by the program that is used to edit them (Cubase). Just gives an error about 'project file is invalid'.

So looks like they've been corrupted in the deletion/retrieval process. Annoying, but I can rebuild from other earlier backups if I spend the entire weekend doing it

They were on an external SSD. Nothing has been written to it since deletion. The circumstances should be good for a successful retrieval. Oh well.

One last thing: Would it matter which computer deleted the files from the external SSD? I'm backing up archives to the SSD using one laptop, and then using another newer one to access them going forward. It's just occurred to me that I deleted them on the newer machine, but have run the File Retrieval software on the old machine. Both accessing the same drive so probably not. Just a thought...

[mmm-five]

SSDs are not a good backup solution. Either use a HDD and/or a cloud-based backup.

SSDs will 'clean' their own deleted areas as part of their perfomarnce/housekeeping duties.

You've probably just got the header, and the next xxx cells of data as per the header info...but those cells have already been allocated to something else, so you're recovering parts of a different file or bits of lots of different files.

[nuyorican]

mmm-five said:

SSDs are not a good backup solution. Either use a HDD and/or a cloud-based backup.

Well you learn something new every day. I switched to SSD after an old external backup drive got pushed off the desk whilst backing up and couldn’t be accessed afterwards. My data is like sheep. It just wants to die and will find any possible way to achieve it.

I thought I was on it with SSD, cloud and FileHistory. But again, my data has found a way to wriggle free. I’m trying to move to Mac so at least it’s just one regular backup with TimeMachine rather than having to save files and system settings/apps separately.

[Mr Pointy]

Do the files sizes look correct or are they all much smaller than expected - that would tally with the post above about only recovering partial files from SSDs

[nuyorican]

They look the right size.

My initial thought was that it was just the program used to open these files that was being overly fussy. But in amongst the files are audio files. I can open these with a wave editor and they’re just solid white noise.

So, corrupted