question - data removed completely after accidental mirror?

[Fenneko]

Dear FreeFileSync community,

I would like to thank everybody who takes their time to answer my question in advance and also the team for developing this software that I have used for many years and never had any main issues with.

Here is my situation: I have around 8 external hard drives + 8 backup hard drives for each of them (so 16 in total). I recently wanted to move a gaming video file to the directory where I keep all my gaming video files only to find out that the directory doesn't exist there anymore, neither on the hard drive nor the backup. I initially thought that I might have moved the directory to another external hard drive to gaming videos taking up a lot of space. However, unfortunately I couldn't find the videos on any other hard drive either, which I found suspicious, especially since we are not only talking about 5-10 videos, but a total of ~1000 videos. It's possible that I accidentally deleted the gaming folder from both the original as well as the backup drive with either freefilesync (or maybe the connection was lost between the hard drives while I was cut and pasting the folder to another hard drive, which I find unlikely because I barely use the cut and paste function simply because of situations like this, but I don't want to rule it out completely). I am currently running some recovery tools over all of my hard drives and the last time I know for sure that I have watched a video in that folder was around the beginning of 2022 and not a lot of data was moved to the hard drives since then. So technically I should find at least SOME of the lost video files on one of the external hard drives with the recovery software, but there is one thing I am concerned about ...

MY QUESTION NOW: Do any of the freefilesync functions, such as the mirror option, remove data COMPLETELY from my hard drive so that they cannot be recovered with software like recuva? Or should I be safe to definitely find something on the hard drive if it had ever been there? Or are there any other options to recover data potentially lost through faulty synchronising settings?

Thank you in advance!
Best, Fenneko

[hapEcat]

I'm thinking that your deleted files should be in your "Recycle bin", or at least that is where mine are set to go after the Synchronization process deletes a file.
Check your "Synchronization Settings" to see where deleted files are set to go.

I've also run into this problem, and have submitted a feature request, so as to rectify this very same problem!

[xCSxXenon]

To answer your actual question, no, FFS doesn't do any type of secure deletion.

[Fenneko]

Thank you hapEcat and xCSxXenon for your replies!

I actually found the files on one of the hard drives with a recovery tool. Still no idea how they got deleated but at least they weren't lost. Will stay more careful in the future.

What might be an issue: I am still using an older version of FreeFileSync because it's preinstalled on my PC image and I never updated it (couple of years old) - would you say a regular update is advised in order to avoid bugs or are older versions not known for bugs either?

[xCSxXenon]

The universal recommendation is to always run the latest version of anything to avoid bugs