Recovering files... that were never deleted?

EchoLocation

A few month back I started cleaning my backup hard drive by erasing some old files and running a freespace wipe. I finally got around to finishing the task recently and I ran Recuva on a deep scan just to check what was found...

It found a fair few images that were all recoverable, with unbroken previews, but the thing is I've never deleted these photos as they are still on the hard drive in various folders. What's more these are fairly old family photos that I haven't even viewed/opened for years.

They didn't have correct files names, just numbers, so does anyone know how/why these files would be have been, presumably, duplicated and deleted by Windows? and seemingly fairly recently as well (unless the freespace wipe was ineffective)?

fwor

This is really only conjecture, but could these files be an artifact from a disk defragment process?

It seems possible - particularly for files moved in the later stages of a defrag - because it is effectively copying and then deleting the files in the process, and the later files are less likely to be partly or completely overwritten.

EchoLocation

Ah you might be onto something there, I did actually defrag the hard disk as well. I have since erased the recovered files so perhaps I'll run Recuva again a few times going forward to see what the results are.