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Question

Help: Recovered Files Unplayable

Jul 27, 2016 6:29AM PDT

I messed up and managed to delete a very large folder of video files on an external HD.

I used recuva to recover the files, and the process seemed to work. However, afterwards, a large number of the recovered video files are unplayable (around 60% – though, a couple seemed to have had their identities transposed i.e. the file name says it is video01.avi, but when I play it in vlc video02.avi plays).

Have I got any options to do another recovery on that external HD to try again, or does the fact that I've *already* “recovered” those files mean I can't have a do-over? i.e. if I ran another recovery program on that hard drive would nothing be available as recuva has already “saved” those files?

Presumably deleting the non-playable files again isn't going to help this issue.

Or am I just out of luck and the non-playable files are junk now?

My tech skills are very limited, so any suggestions to try would be really appreciated, or somewhere else to go to find help, as some of the non-playable files would be very tough to replace. Many thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: recovery
Jul 27, 2016 7:14AM PDT

You can try to clone the disk and work on it with another recovery program, but I don't expect it will help much.

For the future, know that having just one copy (especially on an external hard disk, but on any medium in fact) only should be done for files that are easier to replace than to backup, or that you don't mind at all to lose.
Since backup is quite easy (copying 1 GB from an external USB-3 disk to another USB-3 disk takes less than a minute), it's nearly impossible to find such files..

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Re: recovery
Jul 28, 2016 9:57AM PDT

Thanks, Kees_B. Yes, I have learned my lesson, but I didn't have enough space and was complacent. I'll try cloning if I get no joy otherwise.