I lost many files after a system reconfigure. The files were corrupted when transferred to storage flash drive.
I’ve used Recuva deep scan and have found many “green light” files that are appropriately sized and dated. However, when recovered, they only have nonsense characters, even though I have tried several different formatting to open the file..
Do you have any suggestions?
Sometimes you may have to use some other data recovery software if recuva does not work. here's some of them
http://www.pandorarecovery.com/
Asoftech Data Recovery Free
http://www.asoftech.com/articles/recover-deleted-files-from-hard-disk.html
Recuva
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download
There are other data recovery companies that offers data recovery software that you can use to recover your data like Stellar Data Recovery, Kroll Ontrack , Datarecovery.com etc.
Maybe you need another powerful recovery software like Wondershare and MiniTool Power Data, hope you can recover your lost data.
If you are unable to recover data by Recuva software, then just left the software and try others. Many data recovery companies also offering this software. Some of well known companies are:
RecoveryFix for Windows Data Recovery Software
Kernel Data Recovery Software
Steller
systool tools
It is just that what your situation is. Recuva is well known software. If you can't recover files then they are already affected. No other software can do the job for you if the files themselves are not in good position. The fact is as time passes, chances keeps on getting reduced to recover files.
When you are recovering files, you have to select a different drive to save them from the one you are trying to recover from. The reason is that those same files you are recovering may be written over the other files you will try to recover afterwards. So the first file you recover may (by bad luck) be written over the second file you are trying to recover, and so on. Using a different drive prevents this.
For instance, you may be recovering files from your C: drive, and use a USB flash drive to save any files you may find with Recuva there.
Nice, it is true you have to save to different drive, I hope recuva pop up a warning message
If the files on the flash drive are corrupted they were most likely never fully (functional) transferred to it in the first place. So using Recuva on the flash drive will most likely give you the same corrupted files back.
Your best chance would be recovering them from the original source. If this source (probably your hard drive) was used in the meantime the chances of a successful recovery get smaller every mouse click, every second.
At the end of the day there is no guarantee to successful recovery. More often then not some data would have to be reconstructed, other might be just lost.
Depending on the type of files there are some easy options to try. For example if it were some text documents you could open up Word, click "File > Open" and then select "Recover Text from Any File(*,*)".
Thanks for the suggestions. I've not used the computer for anything other than recuva, saving the "green" files to another flash drive. Yes, there is a pop up warning to save elsewhere. Most of the files lost are word, excel, or pdf. After gathering some of these apparently "good" files I though that I'd try to open some to check on the value of continuing with the search.
Do you think that future versions of Recuva may be successful? Should I continue to recover green files while I still have the opportunity?
I've also tried opening the recovered files in Mac version of Word, with no luck, the recover text from any file was also unsuccessful.
I am recovering the files directly from the original hard drive, and think that I need to move on and accept the lost. Load in my previously saved files and start over.
Thank you for your collective experience!
If you wrote on the hard drive after you lost files, chances are that lost files are overwritten also partly or completely, so you will recover them partly or not at all.
Try with other recovery tools such as pandora recovery or testdisk
Read this link, it may help you:
http://lifehacker.com/393084/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-free-software