I was helping a friend prepare an old hard drive for reformatting from NTFS to exFAT. Before formatting it, I created a folder on my Windows desktop and started copying the drive's files there. The transfer reached about 95% before failing on a recovery folder that contained important photos and videos. I chose Cancel, assuming the folder would remain on the original drive, but afterward I couldn't find it on either the hard drive or the desktop copy. I also tried EaseUS and another recovery tool without success. CrystalDiskInfo reported that the roughly 10-year-old drive was healthy. What is the safest way to recover the missing folder?
3 Answers
Stop using both drives immediately. Every scan, copied file, or other operation can overwrite data that might still be recoverable. Ideally, make a sector-by-sector image of the source drive with a tool such as GNU ddrescue, then perform recovery attempts on the image rather than the original. If the files are genuinely important, a professional recovery service is safer than repeatedly trying different software.
For future transfers, always use copy and paste, verify that the destination contains everything, and only then delete or reformat the source. A canceled file operation can leave partially copied data, and some Windows prompts may remove files already processed depending on what action was selected. Keeping three copies of important data, on two different types of storage with one off-site or cloud copy, is a good general backup rule.
Look for individual files by their known names or extensions instead of searching only for the missing folder. Recovery programs don’t always reconstruct the original folder structure. However, recovery results become less reliable if the destination or source drive has been used since the incident, and SSDs can be especially difficult because of background garbage collection.
I was wondering which software could bring the files back, but I understand that scanning an image of the drive is safer than scanning the original.