Question Disc cleanup ate my downloads; recovery options?

[Siffycup]

I’m running Windows 10 on my laptop. Yesterday I went to do some cleaning and didn’t realize that the downloads folder was selected. It cleaned me out of several important things, but only one I care about, a Word document.

My first thought was to check my Word autosaves, but it wasn’t until I went to do so that I realized apparently my docs haven’t been autosaving, go figure; I have docs from a year ago but nothing from the last 3 months. My next thought was one of the recovery programs floating around (I saw Recuva recommended here?), but so far my attempt to run a recovery scan in 2 out of 3 programs has crashed. If I could only deep scan and recover the Downloads folder specifically instead of the entire drive, I’m wondering if that would make a difference, but I can’t seem to find a program that will do so. I don’t even have much weighing down my hard drive, so I’m not sure why it’d be having a hard time running, but it is. And apparently because my computer hasn’t updated this week, it doesn’t have system restore point for me to revert to. I’m stuck and discouraged. If anyone has any ideas, I’d be grateful.

 

[rgd1101]

first stop using the drive.
then go for paid data recovery service like https://www.seagate.com/services-software/recover/

 

[Botnus]

Well, just because it's deleted doesn't mean it's gone forever. There are some tools and utilities that can be used to recover files. What errors do you receive when trying to recover files with Recuva?

 

[Siffycup]

Well, just because it's deleted doesn't mean it's gone forever. There are some tools and utilities that can be used to recover files. What errors do you receive when trying to recover files with Recuva?

No error message or anything...but after a fifteen hour deep scan it freezes indefinitely. My laptop isn’t young but doesn’t often have issues with crashing or even running slow. I also noticed that even when I did select a specific folder for it to scan as opposed the entire C: drive, it was scanning like...millions. Which I certainly haven’t accumulated in my downloads.

 

[Siffycup]

An update: I tried running the Seagate recovery program above. A standard scan actually worked and turned up good results, but old ones, none from the last few days. An advanced scan, which I’m assuming would do the trick, gets about 40% in and then says it can’t find anything and to try again....which makes no sense to me, as the standard scan had medium success. I’m on my 3rd time trying and each time get the same message to try again.

 

[onespeedbiker]

Do you have a HDD or SSD. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to recover disk cleanup deleted files from a SSD, as the recycle bin is also cleaned out, and unlike with a HDD, when a file is deleted from an SSD it is permanently deleted and unrecoverable using the current available recovery software. This does not mean data is not recoverable from a SSD, it only means you can not undelete files not residing in the recycle bin

 

[DSzymborski]

You're not actually running everything on the same drive you're trying to recover from, are you?