[GDH]

The "rating" for Recover My Files is a measure of whether the file you are trying to recover has been overwritten with other data. Only one file can occupy a storage cluster at any one time.

If a file is partly overwritten it is corrupted and may or may not open depending on what parts and how much of the file has been overwritten and destroyed. If a file is totally overwritten by other data then it is lost for good.

When Recover My Files looks at an MFT record for a deleted file, the MFT record tells Recover My Files in what clusters the file data resides. Recover My Files then checks all the other MFT records for active files to see if the clusters used by the deleted file are also used by an active file. If the answer is yes, then the deleted file has been overwritten. It is possible to work out how much of the file has been overwritten, which is how the rating scale is determined (eg. overwritten means that all the clusters used by the deleted file are now used by an active file and thus it can no longer be recovered.)