Issue when recovering a big deleted file.

[MerleOne]

Hi all,

I did the following test : I copied a 8 GB test file onto a 500 GB USB external HDD, standard NTFS formatted. When I delete the test file (shift-del) and try to recover it, all recovery software I tried so far see a zero size file and won't recover more than the name. All but R-Studio that sees the deleted file with its original size (almost : deleted file size is a few bytes over the original one : 84 486 88 128 against 84 486 87 987). Since I only have the demo version, I cannot try a recovery and see if I recover something I can use afterwards.

Is there a way to be sure I won't recover a 0 byte-sized file ?

Thanks.

[Alt]

No. The only way to be sure that a file will be recovered correctly is to preview it. If it cannot be previewed, nothing can guarantee that it'll be recovered successfully. Well, there's one additional method: manual inspection of the file in R-Studio's built-in editor.

For your case, I believe the recovery will be successful, but I can't guarantee that.

In general, very large deleted files are very hard to recover under NTFS as it deletes so-called run lists.

[MerleOne]

Thanks for the answer. I can preview the file all right, at least it seems so. I'll try the built-in editor.