I thought I might just pass on this info, which may or may not help anyone trying to get back recently deleted files.

I've never had cause to use Recuva until one day last week when my bad, well ingrained habit of using shift\delete, jumped up and bit me very firmly on the bum.

I intended to delete 2 albums I'd grown tired of, but a slip of the mouse and before I knew it I had block shift\deleted 35 albums from my partition.

Fired up Recuva and scanned, and every single track showed up, so I selected them all and pressed "Recover", saving them to my other partition.

I only managed to get back about two thirds of the tracks, and they were all over the place order wise. Try again.

Changed the view mode in Options to "Tree View", and under "Actions\Recovering", checked "Restore Folder Structure".

Scanned again, and now I had my music folder, and a list of albums containing tracks. Selected all and tried recovering again. I recovered all albums, but most of them were missing quite a few tracks. Damn. Try something different.

I decided to deselect all, and to check and recover one album at a time.

Bingo! Using this one at a time method, I recovered every album with every track intact.

Why this worked when mult-recover didn't, I don't know.

Because I did the recover immediately after my slip up, I expected everything to be easily recoverable, and everything was, but only when I recovered them a small section at a time.

Hopefully, someone may find this info useful.

Yes Dennis I'm supprised you haven't use Recuva before even just to see what it does.



Thanks for the tip on checking "Restore Folder Structure". I've always used it without being checked.

Now there is something about Recuva that always puzzles me. I installed CC, Defraggler and Recuva on a friend's laptop. I showed her the settings for CC. I showed her how DF works and I showed her how Revuva works. I did a scan and it shows 22,000 plus files it had found. I thought because DF had never been used and her drive was like a cullender after I Defraged the drive it would find less files. It didn't it still showed 22,000 plus files.

It was only a matter of time Keith before I did something daft. Shift\Delete is really a bad habit.

As to it still finding 22,000 files after defragging, I'd say that was a pretty good effort.

Keith, if you're using Recuva normal scan then the file list comes from the entries in the MFT marked as deleted. After defragging the disk the MFT might be consolidated in fewer places but as I understand it the marked-as-deleted entries remain just as they are, so you will get more or less the same number of files found. I have read that the MFT is similar to a relational table (or tables) and contains relative offsets, so the deleted entries can't be removed or, shall be say, defragged. It could be close to the truth.

After defragging you will probably have a far less chance of recovering anything, even if the filename count is similar.

Good ''real experience'' post to link to for posters trying to recover music.

Glad it all worked out Dennis.

Thanks for the info Augeas.

Thanks hazel, I was one very relieved and very happy bunny.

I forgot to answer this bit Keith, apologies for that.

Of course I've used Recuva before to do just what you suggest, to try it out. I try out every new version.

But as I said in my post, this was my first "real" experience of needing to use it, and 35 complete albums was a bit more of a challenge than the unimportant random files I've previously recovered in trying it out.

And the trial and error recovery process was something I never needed to do with small test files, which is why I thought the info worth passing on.