MisterWhiskers About th idea of “unwriting” data or somehow recovering it from flash cells, I get why you’d hope something like that exists. But unfortunately, it simply doesn’t.
Modern hard drives and SSDs are built so that when data gets overwritten, there’s no readable trace of the original left behind. The system literally writes new 1s and 0s over the old ones. Once that happens, it’s game over for that specific block.
Back in the day, like, way back, there were theories about reading leftover magnetic traces from earlier writes on spinning disks. The idea was that even if something was overwritten, the magnetic signal wasn’t 100% clean and you could (maybe) recover the previous data with crazy-sensitive equipment. But that was on low-density platters with big magnetic footprints.
With today’s high-density drives, the tracks are so tightly packed that any previous write is completely wiped. No residual signal to read, nothing to “extract” .Even the NSA doesn’t have anything that can bring that stuff back once it’s overwritten.
Same story with SSDs. Flash cells physically change when they’re rewritten. There’s no ghost of the old data left behind, it’s not like you can crack them open and read past versions.
At this point, you could still try a couple more scans with tools that were suggested by @HopeInSleep. But if they also come up empty, I’d say it’s time to accept the loss and move on.
