It seems that if I accidently delete something within seconds of it ending up getting deleted, I try to recover it back, but unfortunately every time I do, I can't find it! I thought Recuva was a"file recovery program", but all it does is just ignore files that just get removed by the operating system and not "securely deleted". I work around with video a lot and sometimes I forget to change something and have to go back, but if the original video gets deleted and Recuva can't recover it back, it'd be useless.

Recuva does of course find files that have 'just been deleted by the operating system'. Some 20,000 in my case.

I'm not sure what you're actually saying. Do you take a copy of your video file and then delete the original, or edit and overwrite the original? If the former, then perhaps holding on to the originals until the new versions are proved would help. If the latter then the file hasn't been deleted and Recuva won't be able to find the old version.

Do you delete using the recycler? If so, are you Vista or XP? Deleted files (may) have their names changed using the recycler.

You need to remember that Recuva is exactly that, a 'Recovery Program', not a 'Backup Program'. If you've deleted a video, then continue to work on other videos, the chances that the new video overwrites the old one on the drive are great. Thus the old video will not recover.

Recovery programs work best when you run them immediately after deleting the file, so that another file does not have a chance to overwrite the original.

In the case of Video work, I'd recommend you 'Backup' each version of your video as you go so that you can restore it at a later time if needed. An easy way would be to 'save as' incremental file names. ie: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, etc... Then delete the ones not needed when you have a finished product.

Hi, I was trying to recover files from a compact flash card and was able to recover files that I had taken years ago, but strangely the files that I wanted and had only just been deleted were not found. These were photos that were taken on Fuji Finepix s7000, and they were deleted in-camera (perhaps a secure deletion is performed by this camera, does anybody know?). Only 1gb (485 files) were recovered from this 2gb card and nothing was recovered from recent shots, i.e. even stuff that wasn't deleted in-camera but deleted when I moved them across to my computer, only the files that I had taken about 2 years ago were intact. None of this seems to make any sense, I'd be very grateful if I could get some help on this, thank you.

The camera also formats the card in FAT16 and Recuva only seems to search the first gigabyte and ignores the second. Is this is a bug? I gather that my card is not very fragmented because I seemed to be able to recover most files, I understand the limitations of FAT16.

We will investigate the FAT16 issue.
Thanks
MrRon