Less files each time?

[Albert]

Here is a quick question for you, GDH.

On the same hard drive that I am attempting to recover, do the number of files recoverable decrease everytime I run RMF?

There is this small hard drive I was trying to recover. Just to be safe, I ran RMF's format recovery a few times on it, and each time saving to a different destination. My thought was to make sure that I have recovered as many files as RMF is capable.

Then I noticed that teh number of files recovered each time gets smaller and smaller.

Is this because each recovery process actually damage the original files more and more?

Again, I thank you for your timely responsive. You're the best customer support that I have seen in a long time.

[GDH]

Recover My Files is written so that it does not change the contents of the drive being searched. This was the design of the software from the begining. Our background was in computer forensics for law enforcement, so it was always vital in that regard that the contents of the computer being examined was not altered by the examiner.

Having said that, in home user data recovery you are not operating in a read only environment. If you are recovering data from your C: drive where Windows is installed, Windows is constantly writing to the disk, and therefore the contents of the disk is continually being changed. For this reason, if you run Recover My Files multiple times you will not get exactly the same results each time.

It is much less likely that Windows will change the contents of secondary drives connected to your system. However, it is possible for Windows to do this and there are also a variety of other programs that will do this as well (including virus scanners, spyware scanners etc). I would check to see if you have any programs like this checking your connected drives when you restart the PC.

When you are talking about a Format Recover, Recover My Files is using the Operating System Master File Table records (MFT records) to find the locations of the lost files. The MFT is much like a spreadsheet at the start of the disk that tells the computer where the files are located on the disk. There is a change happening in the MFT - which is why you are getting different search results.

It is much, much less likely that the Operating System will change the actual physical files on the disk. Unless the user deliberately saves a file to the disk, or the Operating System writes a file (such as the Windows Swap file) to the drive, the file content of the disk will remain relatively constant.

When you run a "Complete File Search", where files are found by their unique file header and footer, the results should be constant.

I hope this make sense. There is more general information located in these articles: http://www.recovermyfiles.com/file-recovery.php

[Albert]

Thanks for the detail explaination. I learned a lot.