This issue is pretty wack. I've used recuva before in the past and it has worked perfectly.
A few weeks ago I reinstalled it and the results have been weird. I'm trying to recover videos, and it's hardly showing me any in drives that had 100s. The few it does show are from 5+ years ago, nothing recent. And even those ones, after recovering the files ... those files don't work.
I thought maybe recuva had some new update so I experimented with other software (not sure if allowed to list)... I'd say I experimented with all the free ones. Same stuff! One in particular was able to get a few extra results with file names that were quite recent. But same thing, after I extract it won't work.
So now, I built a new PC with win10 (before was win7), added the HD with files as secondary, and tried recuva and still same results. I've tried using some old version site for older version of recuva... still same.
I'm not sure what's going on but it's too weird if it's same result across different software and different OS.
Before when I used recuva, I would get a whole library of deleted stuff because all of my HDD were hardly touched because I use SSD as my main drive.
So to experiment, I added a bunch of videos to my new HDD and then deleted some. Recuva isn't picking up any of them nor is the other software.
Is it some windows setting perhaps?