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Why Lost Files Can’t Be Recovered by Recuva?

“I lose some important files on my PC. I read that Recuva can recover deleted files when the recycle bin has been erased. So, I download and run Recuva to scan my hard drive. After 1 hour scanning, it only finds a few of the lost files and the recovered files can’t be opened correctly. Could you tell me why my lost files can’t be recovered by Recuva, and how to solve this issue?”

Recuva is a popular data recovery program which developed by Piriform. But this free data recovery program is not all-around data recovery program, which could not solve all data loss issues. Due to some reasons, Recuva can’t recover your lost files. For example, you can’t recover your lost files or the recovered files can’t be opened correctly in these situations.

1. You have reformatted your hard drive.

Recuva couldn’t recover the reformatted hard drive. If you can’t recover your lost files with Recuva or the recovered files can’t be opened correctly, you should try raw recovery. A more powerful data recovery program - Do Your Data Recovery Free, can help you recover raw data or give you deep scan option to find reformatted data on your hard drive.

Do Your Data Recovery Free is a free data recovery program which is much more powerful than other data recovery programs. It offers a deep scan mode named “Advanced Recovery” to ensure finding the reformatted files on hard drive.

Here is a guide: Can’t find the lost files or the recovered data can’t be opened correctly?

2. The lost files are on your Mac.

If you lose files on Mac, Recuva can’t help you recover your lost files because Piriform does not offers Mac version of Recuva. This program only can be installed on Windows computer. If you want to recover lost files on Mac, you can use this Mac data recovery software - Do Your Data Recovery for Mac Free. This free Mac data recovery software can help you perfectly solve data loss problems on Mac computer.

3. Your files are overwritten.

The deleted or lost files are stored on the free disk space of the hard drive. But the disk space of the deleted/lost files is available for new data or files. When the disk space of the deleted/lost files is overwritten by new data, you can’t use Recuva to recover them. But, we still recommend you to try Do Your Data Recovery Free to scan the hard drive to recover your deleted/lost files.

4. The files are erased by data erasure software.

If you use data erasure software to erase your files, the files are gone forever, can’t be recovered by any data recovery software including Recuva, Do Your Data Recovery Free. So, if you want to prevent your files being recovered by data recovery software, you can use data erasure software to erase your files permanently. DoYourData Super Eraser is a famous data erasure software which can 100% erase targeted files and prevent data recovery.

The lost files can’t 100% recovered by Recuva or even can’t be recovered by Recuva at all in the 4 situations above. Do Your Data Recovery Free is a good alternative of Recuva. It has comprehensive data recover features and allows to perform raw recovery, reformatted file recovery, deleted partition recovery. You also can learn how to avoid data recovery in this article - before you selling or donating your computer, you may need to permanently destroy your sensitive data.

Why Lost Files Can’t Be Recovered by Recuva?

If your files can’t be recovered by Recuva, just try Do Your Data Recovery Free. It offers advanced recovery mode and will deeply scan your hard drive. The advanced recovery mode is able to find every recoverable file on your hard drive. Do Your Data Recovery Free is able to find much more lost files, raw files than Recuva.

DoYourData Author

Written & Updated by Justin Kenny

Justin Kenny is a writer & editor of DoYourData. He joined DoYourData in 2016 and focuses on writing articles about Windows data recovery, Mac data recovery, external device data recovery, hard drive clone, data erasure, Mac cleanup, computer issue fixes, etc. He is a super fan of Apple devices and is big on testing new digital device and system utility software.

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