Possible to recover older, previously deleted files with R-studio?

Solution 1:

No it is not (well, it might be, but highly unlikely).

What happens is that R-Studio examined the file-system (in the case of your NTFS disk, the MFT and saw a bunch of files that have been marked as deleted (their names are still there, but the system put a special flag on them indicating that they are deleted and the space they occupied is available for new files to use). When you write new files, they may overwrite the clusters that deleted files had previously used, but the new files will usually get their own, new entry in the MFT instead of overwriting the old ones (up until a point, then either the MFT gets expanded to make more room, or very old entries get reused, depending on your configuration).

As a result, when a program looks directly at the MFT, it may see a list of many old files that have been deleted a long time ago (which when added up will, can of course be larger than the total size of the disk). However this does not mean that you can recover them because the MFT is basically just a list of files that exist or have existed on the system; the actual contents of the files are stored on disk and once they are deleted, they may be overwritten by new files.

This is not as big of a problem if you have plenty of free space because the system may use space that has never been used before, but eventually, it will start reusing clusters that used to belong to files. Worse, when the drive gets full (like it was in your case with 97% full), the system will overwrite clusters from deleted files.

Therefore, even though you can see a list of files that you once had, their contents have been overwritten a long time ago and thus completely unrecoverable.