Trying to restore lost files with Recuva, none of the desired files found.

[stewie-Y]

I have a computer here which is running Windows 8 and just went through an operating system reinstall. I'm using a file recovery program called Recuva, which I've used before with much success, but I'm having little success right now.
The options I have selected are "Show files found in hidden system directories", "Deep Scan" and "Scan for non-deleted files". When I run the recovery, I get hundreds of thousands of recovered files, but not the ones that I have been requested to recover. I was told to recover all the pictures that were in the "Libraries" > "Pictures" folder, which is populated by "C:\Users\user\My Pictures" and "C:\Users\Public\Public Pictures", but the only file found in either of those locations on the recovery was desktop.ini.

I can't imagine that the one folder with all these pictures is completely unrecoverable, while 200,000+ other files are. Can anyone tell me what's probably going on? Thanks.

[BC_Programmer]

Recuva can only recover data for files that have had none of their data overwritten. If any part of the file is overwritten, the file is not really recoverable.

A Reinstall will write a lot of data to the drive that has a very high chance of overwriting a lot of data, and in particular, overwriting the MFT File entries for the files that were deleted- if those are gone, the files cannot be seen.

Either that, or the files never existed to begin with. Depending on how the reinstall was done, there might simply be nothing to recover- the deleted files you are seeing are files deleted since the reinstall, and not before. If the reinstall performed any sort of format.

[stewie-Y]

The reinstall was done via Windows 8's "Remove everything and reinstall Windows" option in "Update and recovery". Because of this, I though that at least some of their family pictures would be found by Recuva. Unfortunately, the only ones I've found are all mainly in AppData, Program Files, and in the Windows directories.

[Geek-9pm]

This does not help. 
But... Next time try doing a fresh install on a new or spare hard drive. Then later you can recover your stuff from the old drive.

[stewie-Y]

This does not help. 
But... Next time try doing a fresh install on a new or spare hard drive. Then later you can recover your stuff from the old drive.

Definitely, the problem is this isn't my computer, it's my Sister's and her son is the one who did it. And, of course, there are no backups.

[Geek-9pm]

Sorry to hear that . 
FYI: Automatic backups and incremental* can be scheduled in Windows. But the user has to set it up.

Configuring Automatic Backups

* Using an incremental reduces space needed.

[stewie-Y]

Thanks for the info.