Same drive, same format, same scan — the documents open perfectly and half the photos are grey, torn or unplayable. That is not bad luck or bad software. It is how files are physically laid out on a disk, and once you understand it, you can set the right expectations for every file type.
People judge a recovery by counting files. Technicians judge it by asking which kind of files — because a one-page letter and a two-gigabyte video live on the disk in completely different ways, and deletion treats them very differently. This page explains the gap honestly, so a scan result that looks unfair will actually make sense.
👆 Small files written once survive best; large, long-lived files are scattered — and only some fragments get found (panel recreated as an illustration)
A file is not stored as one object. It is stored as blocks of data, and the file system keeps the list of which blocks belong to the file. A small document usually occupies one continuous run of blocks, written in a single moment. A large video recorded over time, or a file on a nearly full, busy disk, gets its blocks wherever free space existed — scattered across the drive. Deletion throws away the list. Rebuilding a one-run file is trivial; rebuilding a scattered file means guessing the order of hundreds of pieces, and getting even a few pieces wrong corrupts the result.
A JPEG is read top to bottom. If the first blocks survive and later ones were overwritten, the photo opens with its top half perfect and the rest grey, green or smeared — the classic half-photo of recovery stories. If the opening block itself is gone, the file will not open at all, even if 95 percent of its data still exists somewhere on the disk. Raw signature scanning makes this worse in one specific way: it finds photo data beautifully but returns files with generic names and no folders, so a recovered family archive arrives as thousands of numbered images to sort by hand.
Documents are small, written in one burst, and often have help: many office files carry internal structure that tolerates minor damage, and the same document may exist in temporary copies, email attachments and synced folders. But a document that was edited daily for years — an accounts file, a database, a mailbox file — is fragmented and constantly rewritten, so its newest version may be unrecoverable even while an older copy survives. Judge document recovery by which version came back, not merely whether the filename did.
The channel's real test shows exactly this pattern — whole files, damaged files and missing files side by side. Watch it before your scan so the result will not shock you.
▶️ Watch Full VideoUsually not fully. The grey area is data that was overwritten — no tool can invent the missing half of a real photograph. Keep the file anyway; for family photos a damaged copy is often better than none, and image editors can crop or soften the damaged region.
Possibly — video files need their header and index intact to play, and those may be in a fragment the scan did not connect. Some players and repair tools can rebuild playable video from raw fragments, but results vary and large, fragmented recordings are the hardest files in all of consumer recovery.
Names come from the file system's index. If that index survived, a scan restores names and folders for everything it lists. Photos found by raw signature scanning — the deep scan — never had name information attached, so they return with generated names even when the image itself is perfect.