Have you been able to actually recover any of the file listed in your recovery program ? Or is it just random file names?
Yes some files can be previewed within the recovery program and recovered. The names are just JPEG_1, GIF_2, Text_3 etc. The text files contain info such as:
//-- Google Analytics Urchin Module
//-- Copyright 2007 Google, All Rights Reserved.
//-- UTM User Settings
var _ufsc=1; // set client info flag (1=on|0=off)
var _udn="auto"; // (auto|none|domain) set the domain name for cookies
var _uhash="on"; // (on|off) unique domain hash for cookies
var _utimeout="1800"; // set the inactive session timeout in seconds
var _ugifpath="/__utm.gif"; // set the web path to the __utm.gif file
var _utsp="|"; // transaction field separator
var _uflash=1; // set flash version detect option (1=on|0=off)
var _utitle=1; // set the document title detect option (1=on|0=off)
var _ulink=0; // enable linker functionality (1=on|0=off)
Also I wonder if your recovery program is listing active files on your hard drive.
A definite no, otherwise there would be lots more that I would recognise.
Just as a test can you make a file called “thisisatest.txt” then write some text in it. Erase it and then try to recover it.
I don't think I've ever recovered anything that I've previously wiped with Eraser. The 'recovered' files of this topic have probably been those that I've just deleted and not wiped.
On the subject of file-recovery, my system HDD started playing up a few months back. A Maxtor diagnostic floppy ran some tests and reported that the drive was about to fail, and urged me to copy the files from it. Finally, although the platter was still spinning, the drive refused to boot. I tried a file recovery program (the same one as before). It recovered thousands of files but, the downside was that many were duplicated over and over, were named as File0001, File002, etc, and many text files contained 'mixed up' text, with HTML wording in them. It meant opening up every one to see what they contained.
Then I tried a recovery program - it was brilliant. I was lucky that the drive held out, as it took 30 hours or so to each scan. But the program acted in a completely different manner to the previous one. It presents you with an explorer-like tree-structure of your files, so you can expand all your folders and tick off exactly which ones you want to recover - all complete with their original file names, and nothing was jumbled up. In my case, I can heartily recommended it.