No. I saved the recovered files on my External Hard Drive and again on my thumb drive. The software said to NOT save the recovered file in the same location as where they were before deletion.
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Okay, but where is that original location?
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Yes. That’s why I knew right away when something was wrong. Due to memory holes, I had a folder called Notepad Jottings on my desktop. I dropped most recent things in there. For some reason, I had thought it was a shortcut, not the actual folder - mind tricks, so yes, while trying to get rid of the shortcuts that land everytime you install something, I highlighted that folder too, without realising it, and pressed Shift+Delete.
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So no guarantee this will show anything. Open up file Explorer and right click the “desktop” shortcut on the left side menu. Go to previous versions. See if anything is there.
And just to confirm, you did try Windows Restore already, right?
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That restores settings, NOT files according to my research and that’s the first thing I thought to try, but no dice. It’s not designed for that.
I don’t know if previous versions of “Desktop” would work. I’ve seen that for the actual file itself, provided you still have the file, in the same location, and perhaps it didn’t save properly, or you deleted something within the doc by accident. Then you could do the right click for “See previous versions”.
Trial netted: There are no previous versions available.
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Yes, it restores files in the designated areas(that windows loves) but you had it in a different place.So MAYBE it will restore it.Just for “shits and giggles” try it because I am not having any luck here so far…
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Not sure what you mean. I didn’t save the recovered file back in the same place they originally were.
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Yes, we’re trying to recover the original since the software recovered appears borked.
Give it a whirl for the latest restore point before your cleanup
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Last resort, as per always is system restore, yes. Trying out other suggestions made right now. Just opened the Driftland giveaway, so was tidying that up.
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Since restoring only sets me back functionally in time, I usually do it fairly early. I can always reinstall things or uninstall them again.
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"System Restore uses a feature called System Protection that regularly creates restore points on your computer. You can restore your Windows system files, registry settings, and programs installed on your system.
However, your personal files stored on your computer remain untouched. System Restore cannot help you recover your personal deleted files such as photos, documents, emails, etc. So, you will need to find another way to recover your deleted files."
The above is why I’m not exactly rushing to try it. Notepad doesn’t seem to have autosaves (and therefore backups or other versions) like Word and other such programs, so I don’t see really how much good it could do.
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I’m not at my personal computer so I don’t have access to this.
I’m just giving options
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Understood and appreciated. Just explaining where I am in the process and why I’m doing what actions etc.
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I do like the idea mentioned above of trying notepad++. Notepad is commonly garbage for trying to display anything not in standard coding format.
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Unfortunately, it had no effect at all. Good thought though.
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Yes, I am using Notepad++ with no success…
TRY the system restore…PLEASE…
I am still playing it with it… But having a NEW laptop…I don’t have the programs I had on my PC>>
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Good thinking. Optimally, you would also have turned off the computer immediately when you noticed the file was missing and started the recovery process using an OS running live from a USB-drive. Sorry for the hindsight 
. Manually deleting the file (most likely) only erased the entry/link for said file in the filesystem (I wonder if NTFS has backups for the filesystem entries, or if it’s only for specific folders for system recovery or something) and left the original data sitting where it was on the hard disk. That’s why minimizing writes on the hard disk is important in scenarios like these, because even booting/using the OS and applications creates a lot of data that, in the worst case, ends up where the data you want to recover previously was.
In your scenario it should’ve been quite easy for competent recovery software to restore the file. I haven’t used data recovery software (or Windows for that matter) for years, but which software did you try? Did it take a long time to do a scan or did most of the files (the ones you mentioned were working) appear pretty much instantly in the results? If it was fast, it means it found the deleted pointers to the data in the file table and recovered the files that way instead of scanning the hard disk for raw data that could be interpreted as a known filetype.
It could just be that the data got (partially) overwritten before you tried restoring it and the result is the messed up file you see.
Edit. Not sure I’ll be able to do much, but I could take a look at the file you managed to recover and see if I could come up with something. PM me a link to it if you want to.
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@nassi I’m PM ye. And yea, it was hours before I realised what had happened.
I did System Restore. Got back the same stupid icons I had wanted to delete. Also got back the parent folder on the desktop - not one file in it, corrupted or other. No option to restore to previous version when I right clicked either.
Also, Google Chrome decided to only run as a background process now, so I had to log in using Opera.
Now I’m not sure if to try recovery again. System Restore only gave me a bare 2 restore points and neither of them helped. I don’t know if there’s a way to find older ones. Before, you used to see a calendar and just pick the date you wanted. Dunno what’s up with Win 10.
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Microsoft translator detects it as Japanese and it says “We’re going to have to do this.”
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It’s nonsense in Japanese and contains a non-CJK symbol, looks like binary data that overwrote the old file. The repetition of 刜 is also pretty weird and seems like an artefact of structured binary data being interpreted as text.
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