Updated on February 25, 2026

Henry

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:01 am

Shift-deleted photos recovered from SSD but all JPEGs are corrupted

Hi Team,

Customer shift-deleted a 12GB photo folder from Desktop (Windows 11, NTFS, internal SSD). They used third-party recovery software and restored the full folder structure.

Problem:

All JPEG files recovered

File sizes look normal

Thumbnails sometimes load

But full images won’t open or show heavy distortion

Customer is asking if the files can be repaired or if this means permanent loss.

Need technical clarity before responding.

This topic was modified 14 hours, 9 minutes ago by Henry.

Android recovery

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Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

Isla Voss

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 11:27 am

Final recommendation for customer response:

Explain SSD TRIM behavior clearly

Clarify this is not software failure

Advise maintaining backups moving forward

No further write attempts on SSD

Technically, this case falls under physical block clearing, not repairable corruption.

Orin Thorne

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 11:25 am

Correct.

Repair tools can fix:

Broken JPEG markers

Corrupt quantization tables

Header inconsistencies

They cannot recreate overwritten scan data.

Given NVMe + TRIM + delay before recovery, this is likely permanent data loss

Henry

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 11:23 am

Yes..after certain offset, large blocks of 00.

So I assume repair software won’t help?

Mira Lennox Lennox

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:36 am

Also worth checking:

Are recovered files full of 00 values after a certain offset? That’s common in TRIM scenarios.

If so, no repair tool can reconstruct missing pixel data.

Ezra Flint

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:29 am

Not necessarily.

JPEG header (SOI marker + metadata) is stored at beginning of file. If only the first clusters survived, header can look valid while image body (scan data) is gone.

A valid header alone doesn’t mean recoverable image data exists.

Henry

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:26 am

Some files show valid JPEG headers when opened in hex editor. Does that improve chances?

Kael Rowan

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:23 am

Agree with @Silas.

If thumbnails load but full images fail, two possibilities:

Thumbnail cache in Windows (not from recovered file)

Partial header data survived, but image scan data is zero-filled

If large portions are gray or unreadable, that’s consistent with TRIM-cleared sectors.

This reply was modified 13 hours, 48 minutes ago by Kael Rowan.

Silas Vane

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:19 am

That timing is important.

On SSDs with TRIM enabled (default in Windows 10/11), deleted blocks are marked and typically cleared by the controller fairly quickly.

If recovery happened hours later, chances are the underlying data pages were already zeroed.

Henry

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:14 am

Yes, confirmed internal NVMe SSD.

System had been running normally for a few hours after deletion before recovery attempt.

Nina Calder

Participant

February 25, 2026 at 9:11 am

First thing to confirm: was this definitely an SSD and not HDD?
If SSD + TRIM was active, the actual data blocks may have been wiped shortly after deletion. In that case, recovery tools can reconstruct filenames and folder structure but not actual image content.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)