Windows 8 How to recover very old deleted files???

[Carmellolb]

About 2 or 3 years ago, I tried upgrading from Windows 7 to 8. Something went wrong though, and I mistakenly used the Custom option instead of of Upgrade. After that, my files were all gone. Everything. I didn’t know at the time what the deal with the Windows.old folder was. When I found out about it, it had already been automatically deleted.

Years later, I am still attempting to get my files back, it was hundreds, maybe even thousands of personal files that are very important.

I’ve tried using recovery apps, and I even spent my money on Disk Drill, only to find that it found nothing, except for a backup file that did contain some of my files, but it was corrupted.

A lot were stored on OneDrive, and for some odd reason, none of them are there. The folders that contained them are, but they are all empty.

Is there any way to get these files back? Even some?

 

[Neemobeer]

Timing is pretty critical for recovering files, if you don't attempt it right away it's very unlikely you will be able to recover them. When a file is deleted the index in the MFt is marked as available and the data remains on the disk. In this case data is pretty easy to recover. Even if a new OS is installed it's typically installed on the same physical sectors of the disk. As new data is written it will start overriding those marked deleted item locations. Once a file is written one or more times to the location the old file was stored at it's likely gone at that point.

 

[Carmellolb]

Timing is pretty critical for recovering files, if you don't attempt it right away it's very unlikely you will be able to recover them. When a file is deleted the index in the MFt is marked as available and the data remains on the disk. In this case data is pretty easy to recover. Even if a new OS is installed it's typically installed on the same physical sectors of the disk. As new data is written it will start overriding those marked deleted item locations. Once a file is written one or more times to the location the old file was stored at it's likely gone at that point.

What if the old files were in sub folders that I don‘t have on my disk drive now? Or is it reliant on the parent folders like the Users folder?

 

[Neemobeer]

Directory structure is irrelevant it's by disk.

 

[SGTDRE]

Not sure how this would work on an Apple OS, around summer of 2019 on my old PC I started hear clicks from a back up hard drive, at least it sounded like it, and I was getting an IO error either it was on the HDD or sata port, i did a bit research on line and I'm by no means very good in Dos or command prompts but, I used tried this "C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk /F /R /X j:" and it was drive j that I was having a hard time accessing. Long story sort, after a day or so I had recovered all that needed to and just after that the PC died. But I still had everything backed up to other HDD's

Maybe this could at least assist ya in some way.