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No Logs, really?


The Welder

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I've had a unfortunate situation where a child (somehow managed to) delete a folder containing 7.62TB of data files...  In fact over 94k+ files in all.  Now this drive is an iSCSI mount on a NAS, so it's not a OS drive that's going to get damaged by temporary files etc, so it should be a simple undelete job; or so I thought...

 

So, I used Recuva and it managed to find, probably all of the files, however there are quite a few with state that's either unrecoverable or poor etc. and that's what I expected.  Recuva is bound to find files that I'd long since meant to delete etc.  What I find hard to believe is that this program produces NO LOG; I mean literally nothing!  I've got thousands of files to check and go through to make sure they're not corrupt and can be recovered and no way to do this in a orderly fashion without a log file.  I mean, what am I supposed to do?  Keep Recuva open indefinitely whist I verify the recovered files?

 

Okay, so I found there's a /debug switch you can add to the end of the command line, but this only dumps a log of what the program is doing etc and doesn't produce anything meaningful in terms of a recovery operation.

 

Honestly, this literally has to be the stupidest thing I've ever encountered.  How can someone say, do a scan and then properly analyse all the files that can/cannot be recovered in cases where you're dealing with tens of thousands of files?  In fact this insanity is going to force me to use some other undelete software to recover my files just so that I have some like of log I can browse an analyse and see what I have recovered.  Even at the end of a recovery process you get a pointless dialog that says, xxxx files recovered, xxx possibly damaged files and xxx files that cannot be recovered - Okay, it gives you a dialog saying "Cannot recover these files" and gives you a list, but your possibly damaged files, well you just have to trust to luck!  (Recuva just said, you have 2,357 possibly damaged files, okay, so which files are those then???!?!??)  Have I got to scroll through the 94k+ files in the Recuva window looking for the damaged files?

 

Come on Piriform, this isn't rocket science.  Every program should have a log, especially an application like this.

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There is, or can be, a log of files found before any recovery takes place, right click on the l/h pane and select Save List to Text File. I agree with many of your points, though.

 

You can sort the found files by state, then recover the excellent files to a folder on your recovery disk, then do the poor to another folder, and very poor etc. If it's one folder you can filter by folder name in the File/Path box, and then sort by state.

 

7.6 tb of data is a huge amount, and 94k files is a modest amount. The files must be quite large.

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  • 4 weeks later...

7.6 tb of data is a huge amount, and 94k files is a modest amount. The files must be quite large.

 

7.6TB is a huge amount and yes, they are very large files, mostly .iso images of work related content.  Quite a lot being between 30-80GB in size....  Normally all my stuff like this is backed up, but there is this one folder that isn't and since it's not a Network Drive (ie. no network recycle bin etc).

 

Anyway, thanks for pointing out the save to a text file option...  That's actually very useful indeed.  However, this doesn't really replace a proper log file, especially one that contains the results of a recovery operation.  (I write computer games and even I, live by log files in terms of diagnosing issues etc so I think it's more of a basic)

 

Recuva is a great application, I just wished it wasn't marred by such glaring absences in functionality...  Stuff like:

 

1)  No log files as the result of a scan operation or as the result of a recovery operation.

2)  The ability to sort files by state  (So I can see all of the undamaged files first.  Ideally you'd want to sort by state and then by filename)

3)  The ability to hide files that are damaged and cannot be recovered.

 

There's probably a load more other functionality that I think is really a basic missing too.  None of the above things are even difficult to code and integrate and they'd make Recuva infinitely more useable.

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