[SOLVED] Deleted Outlook.pst, no recovery program finds it so far

[slippyjim]

Hi,

It is a Windows 7 Pro machine

Earlier today I cunningly managed to shift delete the Local folder within Appdata as opposed to the contents of the Temp folder, yes I know I should have just used ccleaner but I was in that folder checking folder sizes and got distracted and deleted the wrong folder.......
Afterwards I deleted the contents of the temp folder then realised what I had so shut the PC down

So I have taken the SSD out and connected to another PC and I have tried various programs that I have bought over the years
Get data back 4.25 (old version i believe) - found a few deleted files in Local but not much
easus data recovery 13.5 - found a lot more more in Local but no Outlook folder
testdisk within windows - found similar if not the same as EaseUS but no Outlook folder
disk drill - found similar if not the same as EaseUS but no Outlook folder

Any ideas why the Outlook folder isnt showing up in any programs? Is it because it was such a large file, but even so wouldn't the folder still show?

Any other programs to try?

Thanks

 

[DSzymborski]

You can try Recuva, but if you still don't find it, it's likely just gone and there's not much that can be done at that point.

 

[slippyjim]

oh yeah I forgot to say I tried Recuva first but that didnt find it either

 

[penguintech]

I use OnTrack Easy Recovery : https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/data-recovery/software/windows

 

[ex_bubblehead]

As this is an SSD there is absolutely no possibility of data recovery. Within minutes of a deletion the builtin garbage collection routines zero out the now unused blocks and make them ready for reuse. This isn't like the old days of spinning metal where the blocks were simply marked as available and the data remained in place until overwritten. This is precisely what backups are for.

 

[USAFRet]

I cunningly managed to shift delete the Local folder within Appdata

Any other programs to try?

A time machine.
Go back in time to before this happened, and institute a good backup plan.
Recover from the backup.

Multiple reasons why it is not showing up.

1. SSD. Data recovery is significantly harder on an SSD.
2. user permissions. That folder/file almost certainly is only available in the context of the original user account on the original OS. Putting it in a different PC is a different NTFS account.

If all those things you tried did not work...you are out of luck.