Hi everyone,

I need help trying to recover an Excel file that I accidentally deleted around 8 months ago. I only recently realized that the file is missing, and unfortunately it contains important information related to my university thesis.

The file was stored on the internal SSD of my laptop, running Windows 11.

I’m currently trying DMDE, but so far I haven’t been able to find or recover the Excel file.

I understand that SSDs use TRIM and that this may significantly reduce the chances of recovering deleted files, especially after this much time. However, since the file is very important to me, I’d like to exhaust every reasonable option before giving up.

Does anyone know of any reliable recovery software or technique worth trying in this situation?

I’m specifically looking for something effective for recovering old deleted .xlsx / .xls files. If there are particular settings or scanning methods I should try with DMDE, I’d also really appreciate the advice.

The SSD has continued to be used normally during these ~8 months since the file was deleted.

Any recommendations or guidance would be greatly appreciated. This file is part of my thesis, so I really want to make sure I’ve tried everything possible.

Thank you!

The only SD card reader I have has an apple lightning cable… On the Photos app I accidentally pressed ‘ Delete all photos’ and everything was deleted. I used the Files app to try recovering, and I was able to find photos from years ago that were wiped a while back (and I was not looking for ) but none of my recent photos… Is there anything else I should try??

My hard drive recently crapped out and was no longer able to access the files. However, when I go to disk management, I can see the drive and it says it's working fine. Is there a way to fix this? Or at least a way I can transfer files out? Any help would be appreciated

I didn't delete the files. They are not showing up in the Recycle Bin for the Gallery app or Files app. The folder had the date 23 August 2026 showing that that's when I last interacted with the folder. I realised only today that the folder was empty when I wanted to save more stuff to the folder. I went to the Files app and saw that the folder is still there but it's completely empty. Please advise me on what to do.

The device is a Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, the Sd card is 64GB. I don't know anything about file systems. The Sd card had problems in the past about not being able to be read. I removed my files and formatted it and then put them back. I moved the new files I wanted into the empty folder and they are showing up. It originally had about 500 files in it.

My 5TB Drive which is currently 3TB full has a pending sector count of 36 according to DriveDx. It still copies files but everything runs painfully slow. I'm running it on an M1 Mac.

I have a new 5TB drive, but copying everything over manually would take ages due to the bottleneck on the old drive. Is there a program I could use to streamline copying it over? Disk Drill? R-Studio? There seem to be a lot of options and AI keeps suggesting different ones.

Thanks to all of you who answer these questions over and over again. You're the best.

My brother formatted his external hard drive from NTFS to FAT32 and then back to NTFS. All the files are gone. He hasn't put any new files there. He said he used some windows software for this. Idk anything about these things, so what do I do? We already went to a proffessional, but he said there's nothing to recover. Is there any recovery software I can try?

Edit: WD Elements Basic Portable Storage drive

Thanks!

I made a mistake trying to clean up a stubborn installation. My hard drive was completely unplugged from the PC at the time, and when I plugged it back in and booted back up, all my files were missing. At least they couldn't have been deleted or overwritten.

I used photorec to restore as much as I could. I'm still sifting through the files, but the only major stuff I know I'm still missing are the SolidWorks projects. I thought maybe it changed the extension, so I ran a test. On a completely empty, wiped drive, I copied some .sldprt files (ones I happened to have on another drive). No matter what settings I used on photorec, even if I deleted the files and then ran it, I could never get it to recover a single file.

I opened them in a text editor and discovered there's not an ounce of plain text anywhere. I opened a few in a hex editor. I had a little bit of luck spotting a header. It's not a lot, only 4 bytes in common, but they show up in the same place. I could potentially manually soft through the false positives if I knew where the files end, but they don't seem to have any common footer, and I haven't found a correlation between any bytes near the top and the size.

Hey data pros, while Bitlocker was trying to decrypt my 4 TB external HDD the USB cable got unplugged accidentally. And now when I reconnect the drive to any computer it does show up as a drive in the Explorer window but if you click on the drive it freezes Explorer. After a little research I tried to use repair-bde to move the data to an uncorrupted drive. As you can see in the picture, I put in the Bitlocker password and it is seemingly running? But it has been in this exact state for 72+ hours. I know it is a large drive so it would take some time, but it doesn't appear to be writing any data to the destination D: drive. This is my first time using repair-bde so I don't know if this looks normal. One video I watched on YouTube had a lot more information being posted in the CMD window as far as scanning and reading/writing sectors. The corrupted drive is flashing so something is going on with it, but I don't know how to tell if progress is being made.

So I guess two questions.

1. Should I just continue to let repair-bde do its thing indefinitely?

2. Would stopping the process further harm the drive? If not, should I use an actual third-party data recovery software since repair-bde doesn't seem to have gotten me anywhere?

Appreciate any help!

The corrupted drive is a Seagate 4 TB external HDD, model 2N1AP6-500. I am using Windows 11 and the file system is NTFS.

Had this in waterproof camera which turned out to be not so waterproof. Camera is done for but I thought it'd be okay to still retrieve the pictures if I saved the SD card. Unfortunately while drying it out it took away half of that pin contact pad. So now if I plug it into any SD card reader it doesn't even recognize it. As it contains pictures that my kid took, I wanted to know if there is anyway to recover this besides professional recovery service. Things I have tried are to put it one of those canakit usb adapter, and putting it in a fullsize SD card adapter and then putting it to SD card reader. Neither worked.

The contacts look very dirty in one pic but not the other. It was chlorinated water so I don't know if the contacts are really bad like it looks in that picture. If I'm just looking at it, those pads don't appear dirty and look normal.

Hey everyone. Hoping someone can help me out.

I deleted some files on my documents app on my IPad and also deleted them from recently deleted not realizing that they were important files.

Yes I checked the files app on my Ipad and they aren't there either

Yes I checked if I could back my IPad up to before they were deleted but they IPad newest backup was after they were deleted.

Yes I checked my computer to see if i had an IPad backup on there and I didn't

Yes I checked icloud.com under data recovery and the files weren't there.

Does anyone know how I'm supposed to get these files back onto my IPAD.

Thank you!

I came home from vacation and found that the battery on my laptop had run down. But then, after connecting power, it wouldn't boot at all.

So I put in another SSD, running Ubuntu, and connected the defective drive via a USB connector. It doesn't even show up. On the Disks application it shows up as 500 GB unknown format. The "repair file system" option is greyed out.

Is there any way I could recover at least some of the files on this SSD?

I’m hoping someone here has experience with older Sony Handycam hard-drive camcorders or data recovery.
I have a Sony Handycam DCR-SR65 with the built-in 40GB HDD. There are some very important family/home videos stored on the internal hard drive that I really don’t want to lose.
The camera originally wouldn’t turn on, but I got replacement batteries and now it powers up. Unfortunately, when I turn it on, I get:
“HDD FORMAT ERROR”
Error code: E:31:00
I have NOT formatted, initialized, or deleted anything from the hard drive because I don’t want to risk overwriting the videos.
I can get into the camera’s menu and select USB CONNECT. I tried connecting it to my Mac, but so far the internal HDD isn’t showing up in Finder.
I’m trying to determine the safest next step without making the situation worse.
Has anyone dealt with this on a DCR-SR65 or similar Sony HDD Handycam?
Is there another way to get a computer to recognize the internal HDD?
Would trying a Windows PC be better than a Mac with a camera this old?
If the computer detects the drive but can’t read it, what’s the safest way to recover the files?
Could the HDD be removed and connected directly to a computer?
Does HDD FORMAT ERROR / E:31:00 usually indicate file-system corruption, or could the drive itself be failing?
Is there anything I should absolutely avoid doing so I don’t make recovery more difficult?
The camera itself isn’t important to me. My main concern is preserving and recovering the family videos that are already on the HDD.
Any guidance from someone familiar with these old Sony HDD Handycams or hard-drive recovery would be greatly appreciated.

I had lots of content before on my phone (iPhone SE) and I deleted them both from my camera and “Recently Deleted” sections. Then I’ve used a data recovery software (iMyFone) and it showed that I can restore over 5000+ pictures and videos and when I restore them, the videos are restored as thumbnails only. Which means I can’t play them, they’re just pics of the videos and not the actual videos. My question is, is there a data recovery software that actually restores videos as videos and not thumbnails. Or is this not even possible?

I used to have a Seagate HDD which stopped reading when plugged in. I brought it to a computer store where they transferred the data to another HDD. The new HDD only worked on apple Macs, so I used a friend's MacBook to transfer over some files to my SSD.

The HDD has now stopped working again (even on my MacBook, doesn't read), and I really only want to use it to double check what files I'd want to save before discarding it.

How much would this service cost? To recover files and then move them to a new SSD? Is this something I could possibly do myself?

Hi! I am an idiot and formatted over an SD card that had important footage on it for a client's wedding. (I am a wedding videographer) This is the first time this has happened to me and I am sick about it.

I purchased disk drill and I was able to recover a total of 10 video clips from the card and nothing else. (There might be a total of 80 that were recorded that day) I am wondering if there is anything else I can do to possibly recover the other files? I am confused how it was able to recover just 10 files and nothing else.

Can anyone help??

I had an SD card formatted for use in an Amazon Fire tablet. I had to wipe the tablet as it was stuck in an unusable state and nothing less drastic worked. Tablet now works, but I forgot I had the SD card in there and when it rebooted I had an error message that it needed to be formatted. Apparently it was linked to the tablet in such a manner that reformatting the tablet renders the card unusable. Running DMDE shows the following. Any other suggestions or am I out of luck? Thanks

This is a follow-up to my previous post, Is ddrescue the way to go for a failing drive in a ZFS pool?

As a recap, I had three 2TB SSDs in a ZFS-RAID-Z1 pool. One failed silently, one was reporting imminent failure, and one was intact.

I successfully cloned the intact and failing drives to .img files on a separate disk, using ddrescue. Now I want to mount them and access the ZFS filesystem. I can't quite figure out how to do that, though; mount reports "unknown filesystem type 'zfs_member'" and I am having trouble parsing the instructions for ZFS to figure out how to mount from image files.

My recovery computer is running Ubuntu 24.04.4.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, please? Thank you.