Version 0.2.0
Latest 1 September 2026The release that makes the results trustworthy. Deep scan was reporting live files as recoverable and skipping most of the drive; original paths were losing their parent folders; and several classes of file were offered back as recoveries that could never have worked. Recovery itself now shows progress, can be stopped, checks free space first, and explains what failed and why.
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.pdfcame back asC:\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,SOURCEandCONFIDENCEheaders 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.