I have tried to use Recuva v1.42.544 on an external USB hard drive where my backup software creates its backup archives. The backup script tests the remaining free space on the disk to see if it is more then the specified free space available. If not, it deletes old archive folders until enough free space is available to meet the specified amount.
The problem that bit me is that I had a USB hard drive with old archives, that I wanted to keep, connected to my system by mistake. The backup script did its work and dutifully deleted the old archives. luckily (I thought), there still was not enough free space to perform the nightly backup and so the backup program exited without writing new data to the disk.
Well Recuva finds the deleted folder but the archive file header is shown as zero size and can't be recovered. This is a 19G file (before the script deleted it).
Checking the script I see that the command used to delete the archive folder (named as 20110612, and a subdirectory of E:\IFW_images) is: rd /s /q "%DeleteDir%" The script deleted subdirectory 20110612 and it's parent directory E:\IFW_images as well (probably a bug in the script to delete the empty parent directory).
I have had no luck googling for an undelete program that can recover from this error (using rd /s /q folder_name). No one seems to be aware of the issue. I have given up trying to find an undelete that will work in this instance and for the future will look for a replacement utility for "rd" that will work with Recuva.
Do you have any suggestions?
