Changelog

Version 0.3.0

Added

• Disk images. Create a disk image (Sources panel) copies the selected drive sector by sector into an .img file — the safe first step for a failing drive: read it once, then work from the copy. Unreadable sectors are written as zeroes and counted, and the image must go on a different drive. Open a disk image (.img, .dd, .raw, …) adds it as a source that scans exactly like a drive, with no administrator rights needed. Whole-disk images with an MBR or GPT partition table list each NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT partition separately.
• Save and reopen scans (Ctrl+S / Ctrl+O). A .drscan file keeps every result together with where its data lives and its recovery status, so you can come back later and recover more without scanning again. Reopening reminds you that the drive may have changed since.
• Overwrite detection. Each deleted file’s storage is checked against the drive’s own free-space map. A file whose space now belongs to another file is marked Overwritten or Partly overwritten and its confidence drops, so the result list no longer promises data that is gone.
• Real folder paths for FAT32 and exFAT. These used to show as E:\…\name; they now show the full original path. Recently deleted names recovered from the NTFS change journal show their folder too, provided that folder has not been reused since.
• Keep folders option: recover each file into its original folder layout under the destination (<destination>\C\Users\Sam\Docs\…). Carved files go into a Carved folder.
• More carvable formats, carved to their exact length. New formats: MP4, MOV, HEIC, AVIF, M4A and 3GP; WAV, AVI and WebP; BMP; and older Office files, which are named .doc, .xls, .ppt or .msg from their contents. ZIP (and so DOCX, XLSX and PPTX), SQLite and 7z now end exactly where the file says it ends, instead of at a 50–200 MB cap, and the files inside a ZIP are no longer carved a second time as separate archives.

Changed

• Recovery checks the destination before starting. A folder on the source drive is refused up front, instead of every file failing one by one. When only some items come from that drive, you’re offered to recover the rest.
• Search waits for a pause in typing on result sets over 5,000 rows, so typing no longer lags on a big deep scan. Smaller sets still filter on every keystroke.

Fixed — scanning and results

• NTFS scans found nothing on 4K-native disks. The integrity check on each file record assumed the disk’s sector size, but NTFS always protects every 512 bytes — so on a disk with 4096-byte sectors every record was rejected as corrupt.
• FAT32 recoveries on larger drives could return another file’s data. Windows wipes half of a deleted file’s starting location, so on larger drives the recorded start pointed at the wrong place while still showing 60–90% confidence. The real start is now rebuilt from the candidates whose space is still free and, where the file type has a known signature, whose first bytes match it. A start that stays ambiguous, or whose space has all been reused, is flagged with low confidence and a note.
• NTFS files stored across several internal records were lost or truncated. Those extra records are now followed. A file whose data lived entirely in one of them used to vanish from the results; a file whose layout was split recovered only its first part; and on large, long-used volumes part of the file table itself was never scanned. Only a split whose extra record has since been reused is still reported as partial.
• The carver reported some files twice when a file header fell in the small overlap between two read blocks.
• Carved JPEGs stopped at the embedded thumbnail. The first end-of-image marker in a camera photo usually ends its small preview image, so the carve held little more than the headers. JPEGs are now measured to the real end of the image. PDFs edited after saving now keep every saved revision instead of stopping at the first one.
• FAT32 and exFAT showed last-modified times as deletion dates. Those file systems record no deletion time. The column is now DATE: it shows the deletion time where one exists, and otherwise the last-modified time in italics, with a tooltip saying which. The CSV export gains a ModifiedAtUtc column.
• The NTFS change-journal pass read the oldest 64 MB of a large journal and missed the most recent deletions. It now reads the newest end.
• “Select all” froze the window on large result sets. Each ticked row re-counted the whole list, so selecting 50,000 rows did billions of comparisons. Bulk changes now refresh once.

Fixed — bad sectors, recovery and safety

• One unreadable sector ended a deep scan or failed a whole recovery. Reads now retry a failing range in smaller pieces and fill only the unreadable sectors with zeroes. The scan reports how much could not be read, and a recovery that hit bad sectors is marked Partial. If one part of the scan fails, the others still run, and you’re told which one stopped.
• Incomplete recoveries were reported as “recovered and verified.” A file shorter than its recorded size, or with zero-filled sectors, now gets the new amber Partial status, with the reason. The SHA-256 is still recorded, but it is no longer described as a verification.
• A cancelled or failed recovery left a half-written file in the destination, which also pushed the next attempt to name (1).ext. The partial output is now removed, and a file interrupted by Stop is marked Skipped rather than Failed.
• Closing the window during a recovery cut off the file being written without warning. Closing while busy now asks first, stops the operation cleanly, then closes.
• The source-drive write guard could be bypassed by a subst drive letter or a folder with the source drive mounted in it. Drives are now compared by their Windows volume identity, not by drive letter.
• Launching the app normally while an elevated copy was running failed during startup and left an invisible process behind. It now tells you the app is already running as administrator.

Version 0.2.0

Fixed — wrong results

• Deep scan listed live files as recoverable. Carving swept the whole volume, so every undeleted photo, PDF and archive on the drive was reported as deleted data. It now reads the file system’s own free-space map and carves unallocated space only — which is also dramatically faster.
• Deep scan skipped most of the drive. After matching a header-only signature the sweep jumped forward by that signature’s size limit rather than the file’s real length, so a single 4-byte archive header blinded the carver to the next 50 MB — 200 MB for some types. Only a fully verified carve skips ahead now; everything else resumes right after the header.
• Original paths were truncated for most files. Only the first file found in any given folder got a correct path — every later one lost its ancestors, so C:\Users\Sam\Docs\report.pdf came back as C:\Docs\report.pdf.
• Deletion dates on FAT32 and exFAT were wrong for days 29 to 31, which were silently clamped to the 28th. An impossible date is now reported as unknown rather than coerced into a plausible wrong answer.
• Compressed and encrypted files offered corrupt recoveries. Their raw clusters hold compressed or encrypted data, not file contents, but they were handed back as-is at 80–90% confidence. They are now listed with an explanation and no data attached.
• Very large or heavily fragmented files were silently dropped from the results when their layout record spilled across several entries. Such a file is now listed, and one whose layout is incomplete is flagged as partially recoverable rather than discarded.
• Corrupt records could produce phantom results, and out-of-range pointers were followed — a partly overwritten directory entry could send the reader to a wild position on the volume. Both are now validated, and such entries are listed as unrecoverable with a reason.

Fixed — recovery and the window

• Recovered folders could be written to the wrong place. Each destination path was rebuilt with a blind text replace, which rewrote every occurrence of the source path rather than just the leading one.
• Previewing a large image could exhaust memory — the whole file was read in to draw a 480-pixel thumbnail. Previews above 16 MB now fall back to the hex view.
• Elevating as administrator lost every argument, so an elevated relaunch always started with no drive, no scan mode and no scan.
• The select-all checkbox in the grid header did nothing. It changed its own appearance but never applied the selection.
• Empty-state text was clipped instead of wrapping, and the results grid squeezed its fixed columns until the DELETED, SOURCE and CONFIDENCE headers lost characters. The close button also now turns red on hover, which its style always intended.

Added

• Recovery shows progress and can be stopped. A long batch used to report nothing until it finished and could not be cancelled at all. It now names the file it is on, tracks progress across the whole batch, and offers Stop recovery — items not reached are marked as skipped rather than silently ignored.
• Free space is checked before recovery starts, so a large batch cannot fill the destination drive halfway through. Failures now explain themselves, grouped by reason and naming the files affected, instead of only being counted.
• Deleted folders are now searched. FAT32 and exFAT scans walk into deleted directories, so files that were inside a deleted folder are listed instead of being invisible. Those entries are marked, since a deleted folder’s own data may already be gone.
• Export results to CSV — before recovering, a record of what the scan found (a second scan of a live drive will not return the same thing); after recovering, the recovery report, with each output path and its checksum, which is the only way to verify a recovered file later.
• Filters — recoverable items only, and a minimum confidence. A deep scan returns tens of thousands of rows, and these narrow it to what is worth acting on. There is also a TYPE column, a per-row status column with the reason on hover, and sortable NAME and CONFIDENCE columns — confidence being the one most worth sorting by.
• Items can carry a short note explaining a caveat — why something cannot be recovered, or why its confidence is low — shown as a marker in the results and in full in the preview panel.
• Keyboard shortcuts — Ctrl+F search, F5 refresh drives, Ctrl+Enter scan, Ctrl+A select all shown, Ctrl+R recover, and Esc to stop the current operation or clear the search. The sources and preview panes are now resizable.
• Elevating no longer loses your place, and only one copy runs at a time — two scans of one volume double the raw reading for nothing, and two recoveries writing into one folder race over the same output names.
• Unexpected errors are reported rather than closing the app silently, with a reminder that scanned drives are never modified.

Changed

• Deep scan is dramatically faster. The sweep tested all twelve signatures at every single byte position — roughly 12 trillion comparisons for a 1 TB drive — and now groups them by first byte, so the overwhelmingly common no-match case costs one lookup.
• Short, noisy file signatures are now structurally validated after their magic bytes match, cutting false positives in compressed and encrypted data.
• The select-all checkbox now reflects reality. It is tri-state, applies to the rows the search is showing, and a “N selected” badge reports the true total — including rows scrolled or filtered out of view.
• The empty state tells you which nothing you are looking at — nothing scanned yet, a scan in progress, or a search that matched none of the results. It used to say “No results yet” over a running scan, and show nothing at all when a filter hid everything.
• Scanning, recovering and refreshing the drive list can no longer run at the same time, and scan progress is coalesced to ten updates a second rather than one per item or per block.
• Accessibility — visible keyboard focus on every control (none of the custom ones showed it, which made tabbing through the app invisible), muted text raised to meet the AA contrast floor, screen-reader names on every icon-only button, and checkboxes that are actually visible before they are ticked, having previously sat at about 1.3:1 against the background.
• The startup splash clears as soon as the window is ready rather than always waiting a fixed 1.8 seconds, long recovered paths are no longer capped by the old Windows path limit, and the version badge is read from the app itself so it cannot drift.
• Test coverage grew from 11 to 101 tests, adding suites for path reconstruction, the allocation map, carve-advance behaviour, timestamps, record guards, layout decoding, the recovery service, progress throttling, elevation hand-off, selection state, filtering, and the CSV export.

Version 0.1.1

Added

• Startup splash screen — a branded splash with the “Deep Recovery Desk” wordmark now shows briefly at launch.
• About window — opened from the ⓘ button in the title bar; shows the logo, version, a short description and a clickable copyright link.
• Standalone branded icons at 150×150 and 71×71, alongside the 300×300 Store listing icon.

Fixed

• Scanning no longer freezes the UI. The raw-volume scanners (NTFS / FAT32 / exFAT / carver) now run on a background thread, results are added back to the grid in batches, and progress and the Stop button stay responsive.
• File preview is now built off the main thread as well, so previewing a large file no longer blocks the window; stale previews from a superseded selection are discarded.
• “Recover selected” stayed disabled after ticking individual row checkboxes — it now updates immediately.
• The startup splash window no longer shows a white frame on some systems — it now uses a solid navy background with rounded corners and a matching border.

Changed

• Widened the “Recover selected” button so the label has more breathing room.

Removed

• An unnecessary elevation capability from the package — raw scanning already relaunches a separate elevated process on demand, so the app itself never runs elevated.

Version 0.1.0

Added

• Application shell — a modern dark-themed desktop app with custom window chrome, a branded splash screen, and app / window / title-bar logos.
• Recycle Bin recovery — lists and restores items without administrator rights (highest confidence).
• NTFS recovery — recovers deleted files byte-for-byte from the master file table, and cross-references the change journal to surface names and timestamps of recently-deleted files.
• FAT32 recovery — directory-tree walk, deleted-entry detection, long-file-name reassembly, and contiguous-cluster recovery.
• exFAT recovery — full name preserved on delete; contiguous files recover cleanly and fragmented files are reassembled by following the allocation chain.
• Signature carving (Deep scan) — filesystem-agnostic recovery by file signature for JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF, ZIP/Office, SQLite, 7z, RAR, GZ, TIFF and MP3.
• Live results grid — streaming results with search, per-file confidence colour coding, and a text / image / hex preview pane.
• On-demand elevation — the app runs un-elevated; raw-volume scans prompt to relaunch as administrator only when needed.

Safety & integrity

• Source volumes are opened strictly read-only with sector-aligned access; recovery refuses to write back to the source volume.
• Every recovered file is verified with a SHA-256 checksum.

Known limitations

• Raw scanners (NTFS / FAT32 / exFAT / carver) require administrator rights.
• FAT32 recovery assumes contiguous clusters (the allocation chain is freed on deletion).
• Carved files have no original name or path and may be over-sized for formats without a clear end marker.
• Change-journal entries can surface a recently-deleted file's name and time but usually not its data — shown at low confidence with no preview.