Recovered missing files, now hard drive almost full!

Steves1982 · 10 Jul 2011 at 16:55

I was shift-deleting a few music files from my media drive when I accidentally selected my whole movie folder and shift-deleted it along with them.

I used a recovery tool to recover them and most seem to be ok.

However, now my hard drive shows as having 200GB free when before it had 600GB free. The size of my movie folder was 400GB so it looks as if it has recovered it and left the original space allocated.

I have checked disk cleanup and it shows nothing.

Any ideas on how to get the space back without moving the stuff off the drive and reformatting as that will be a pain?

Thanks

Jordan97 · 10 Jul 2011 at 17:46

CCleaner?

Could you manually look through the drive and try and find any duplicates?

Otherwise, the only option I can think of would be to save the stuff you need elsewhere and format the drive.

Steves1982 · 10 Jul 2011 at 19:03

Just tried to wipe the free drive space with CCleaner but it only saw 200GB free. I also checked for duplicates but there aren't any.

It does just seem to be that the space has stayed allocated after recovery as well as creating the recovered files themselves.

Wish I'd been more careful now!

Kotu · 10 Jul 2011 at 19:35

chkdsk should fix it if the free space is just being reported wrongly.

Did you recovery the films to the same drive they were deleted from? if you did then you should check they are not corrupt as the recovery software may have overwritten bits of them while recovering them

Steves1982 · 10 Jul 2011 at 19:45

Hi, thanks for the idea but chkdsk didn't find any problems either.

I recovered to a different drive and then just moved the files back. also I made sure I didn't write to the drive until after the recovery process had been completed.

Kotu · 10 Jul 2011 at 20:05

give windirstat a try then, it will give a nice breakdown of where the space is being used up.

Steves1982 · 10 Jul 2011 at 23:55

Thanks, that provided the answers, should have thought of it earlier really!

My Acronis non stop backup automatically backs up my law files onto this drive. When I processed the recovery I recovered to my law drive to save overwriting the information I was recovering.

Acronis quietly and efficiently doing it's job added all 400GB to my backup and because the folder is hidden I didn't spot it until using windirstat.

All sorted now. Cheers for the help guys, much appreciated as always!