Lost my research data on a SSD

JulesPeace

New member
Dear Community,

What happened:
on a relatively new bit locker encrypted 1 TB SSD with TRIM activated I lost 240GB of video (.mp4) data from my research on the system partition of Windows 11. There was still ~300 GB of free space. I accidently deleted the wrong folder (the one with my research data) and confirmed, that I want to delete it finally. I had no backup yet, because I simply didn't have a drive with enough free space.

What I did and tried:
I noticed my mistake around 20s later. I immediately turned off the pc by pressing the power button for 5s to prevent the system from writing temporary files over the deleted data, removed the ssd and connected it to my desktop pc. After typing in the bitlocker key, I made 2 deep scans and recovered the files that were in "excellent" condition with "recuva" and with "easeUS Data recovery". The files I received have the right size, but at least the header seems to be gone and can't be played. I tried to repair the .mp4-files with different tools, i.e. restore.media or the "easeUS Data recovery" software - both try to repair the video file by taking the header from a "good" video from the same camera and adding the settings to the damaged file. restore.media tries to extract the video and audia stream in this way out of the file - both streams showed as 0 byte and 1 byte files afterwards. easeUS data recovery delivered a 1s black video of the size of the original file (e.g. 3.4GB).

What I would like to know
As far as I know, TRIM shouldn't have shreded my data within the 20s after my mistake. If it did, I shouldn't have been able to recover the data by a deep scan. Am I wrong here?
How can the file be still there but the header is not? (Since I studied computer science partly, I will be able to understand a deeper explanation)
Is there any chance, to recover my research data?
Do you have any further ideas?

Thank you and don't hesitate to ask further questions!
Jules
 
Last edited:
Top