Document recovery from SSD

[melmac]

A friend of mine deleted all his documents by accident yesterday. He rang me straight away and asked me for help. I told him to shut down the computer and don't touch it. It's an SSD drive and I was hoping that there Operating System hadn't run a Trim before he managed to shut it down.

I brought the computer home and removed the drive and mounted it in my work computer. Making sure Trim was off. And R-Studio is the recovery program that I use. It has served me well in the past.

It found the 12GB of documents that he had deleted. They were all listed as PDF, Excel, Word etc. They weren't listed as zero filled, and all had a high chance of recovery. And It seemed to recover everything fine. But none of the files can be opened. They are all corrupt. I spent a while this morning trying to repair the files. But there are so many files and most of them that I tried weren't repairable.

I then tried both Testdisk and Photorec. Both gave the same results as R-Studio. Seemed to restore the files fine, but none of them can be opened.

My question is, is it worth sending the drive to specialist recovery crowd? They will have no problems recovering the files, but will they be able to restore the missing bits of data that are preventing said files from opening?

 

[ED209]

I assume they have no backup at all? (One drive is active and installed by default on windows 11 if logging in with a Microsoft account)

about sending it off, it depends on how valuable the documents are to them and if they are willing to pay the price to get them recovered, I've never had to go down this route so not too sure if they can recover the files in a working state.

 

[melmac]

He had no backups at all. Nothing. He was told often enough.

I have used a data recovery company once before. It was a different situation, a mechanical hard drive that was dropped and had physical damage. They were unable to get any data back. This situation is different and it would be great to hear from people who have had experiences of something similar.

 

[ED209]

with regards to the recovery side of things maybe find a local company or a trusted 1 online and give them a call.

They maybe able to give you some idea of if its possible or if they may get the same results as you and the recovered data is corrupted.

I would think they would have much better software to use than what customers can find online or have multiple bits of software to do the recovery.

If they just deleted the documents, did they\you check the recycle bin? normally small files like this would go there unless they pressed shift and then delete which would have bypassed the recycle bin and permanently deleted them

 

[darael]

Was the drive encrypted with BitLocker? I've never recovered files from a BitLocker drive before, but I'm wondering if this is why you can't open the files.

 

[hornetstinger]

Was the drive encrypted with BitLocker? I've never recovered files from a BitLocker drive before, but I'm wondering if this is why you can't open the files.

I was thinking of that too, unusual it's every single file. Would have thought encryption would make partition totally unreadable?