I have tried your scenario: 1) run Recuva, 2) create and delete file (from original folder and recycle bin), 3) run Recuva again, but this did not turn up the deleted file. I am using Windows XP SP3 and so I wondered whether Recuva's poor performance might be due to it being designed more specifically for later WIndows architecture (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8)? I tested Recuva Portable on another WIndows XP computer with similar results.Īt this point Recuva is not looking very useful, but if there is a good reason for me to change my mind I am willing to listen to an informed explanation. Oddly, whether I was searching in a specific folder ('My Pictures') or the whole computer (all file types) Recuva said that it found about 79 thousand files, which it ignored: other than the fact that I have never had 79 thousand images in the 'My Pictures' folder, why would the program turn up the same number of files for an image folder as for the entire computer including all file types? Adobe Photoshop), music files and videos, all of which are ordinarily placed in the 'My Documents' (XP)/'Documents' (Vista upwards) folder. files opened in MS Office programs like Word or Excel, image editors (e.g. Not only did these searches fail to find the images that I had deleted only minutes earlier, but none of the files that were located - based on their location and names - were 'user' files, i.e. (Please note that my hard drive is kept well defragmented and still has about 100 GB of free space available so fragmentation of the drive would not have contributed to the following results):ġ) Specific folder search ('My Pictures') Ģ) Recycle bin search (where the images were last located before deletion) Ĥ) Whole computer search for all files types. I tried initially the following settings for the search: I then ran Recuva (portable & later the installed version) in an effort to recover these 'accidentally' deleted image files.

Since I had no lost or accidentally deleted files myself I made copies of several images and then deleted them, firstly from their original 'Pictures' folder and then from the recycle bin to imiitate an accidental deletion. Since one of my brother-in-laws recently experience a serious loss of files on his work computer I began testing out Recuva for its ability to find deleted or lost files: I first tried Recuva Portable and then the version that installs on the computer.

Recuva ccleaner