I've just deleted a massive folder that was too big for recyle bin and not backed up

[Unique]

I've just deleted a massive folder that was too big for recyle bin and not backed up. It's windows 10 NTFS GPT disc size 8tb. It's not a boot disc and nothing has been saved to the disc after I deleted.

I've been looking at free file recovery software and most look like they can recover files but only if you save them to another drive. Is that the only option?

So far I've tried puran file recover and it shows all the files in good health, as I was expecting, but showing with 0 bytes file size when the files are usually GB's in size.

I've basically been moving files around onto new drives, and after copying/moving stuff I deleted the wrong folder by mistake which I temporarily had no backup.

Easus is limited to 2tb. Does anyone know the best free software and If I can get the files back without having to move to another drive first, and one that can address the 0 bytes issue?

Thanks for your help.

[spacein_vader]

Recuva is my go to for this, not sure of any maximum size limits though.

[kalniel]

Microsoft have their own File Recovery Tool in the MS store (free) as well.

[samuraiweasel]

Recuva is my go to for this, not sure of any maximum size limits though.

Another Recuva recommendation from me as well.
though I have used Photorec in the past as well with good results, it's got an older cmd line style interface though.

[Unique]

just to update. i tried recuva and it showed files but said they were unrecoverable. a bit of a google and easus said their software was better and could usually fix those. i tried the demo and it showed the files as recoverable but the trial only recovers 2gb and it's £60 a month for the working version. so knowing easus could do it i tried a few more things and found the free home version of wise data recovery showed the files as recoverable and i've recovered most so far. i had to recover to another disc, and initially the software stopped as the disc was full. so moving a bunch of files around i started from scratch with a second drive of the same size as the deleted one and it recovered a lot more data, but i was clicking around the list and it seems to have knocked the selections out and then stopped. so i'm moving the recovered files from the other drive to the same big drive and that should be most of the files and then i'll look again and recover the rest. it looks like a few files are damaged, not sure how unless anti virus or something has put phantom files on the drive, but it's not a big deal

it looks like if you delete a huge folder that's too big for the recycle bin it moves the files to a completely hidden folder structure which started something like "more" so the folders were "more\deletedfolder\files", whereas the files in recycle bin are "recycled\deletedfolder\files"

the wise data recovery free version only seems to work in this case as i picked up on the issue straight away before data was written to the disc. if the drive was formatted or partitions deleted (which i was going to do next) i'd need the paid version which is $45

i also looked at ashampoo which was $20 but had a deal for $9 but it wasn't going to do it. if it was £20 or so and it would have fixed everything without having to save the files to another drive i would have went for it as it would have saved a day or two or moving files back and forth. i'd never heard of wise data recovery beforee, it showed up in a list of best free undeleters. i noticed some of the first sites to come up with these lists are from the companies that sell software. freeundelete was what i used to use and that was fine, but it's old and doesn't list windows 10 but probably still works

the MS tool was command line so looked a bit easy to make a mistake and screw up. the easus one looked good. i generally use their free versions for partitions and backing up etc. if it was important data then £60 to recover terrabytes of stuff, but wasn't in this case. it'll make me pay more attention in future. ironically i was increasing discs and copying data to the new ones, then delete the old one and put something else on, and choose the wrong drive!

[watercooled]

As mentioned by samuraiweasel, PhotoRec is a very powerful file recovery utility.

I've only just spotted this thread unfortunately, but the very first thing you want to do upon noticed the files are gone is stop using the disk they're on. If that happens to be the OS disk, really you should be taking it out and doing the recovery on another system as any write to the disk risks permanently overwriting the deleted files. Also you want to recovering the files to another drive as writing them back to the same drives risks overwriting things. If the files are deleted from an SSD with working TRIM, it's often game over right there.

[hal1000]

Sounds obvious - but try googling - best recovery tools 2020