I used R Studio to recover and save the files. As far as the drive goes, there is no default encryption unless it's doing it without my knowledge. None of the other things I have saved to that drive are encrypted.

As far as where specifically I created a new folder on my desktop and saved everything there. Same PC just a different drive.

OS is completely unchanged. I had the data on a storage drive (D:) originally. When I recovered the data I saved it to my primary drive (C:). Unless Windows snuck in an update without my knowledge (which is a possibility sadly, thanks MS) everything is exactly the same as it was before.

After letting both run over night I was able to retrieve my files but each one has a corresponding .$efs file partnered with it. I guess that means the files are encrypted. I have no experience with encryption so I'm at a total loss here. Is there a way to decrypt them? Or am I just out of luck and ...

I'll give them a shot thanks

I have used EaseUS, Recuva, Undelete360, and TestDisk for recovery. Each case ends with the same result. No read errors to speak of with the exception of files that had already been overridden.

I saved it to a different drive as I didn't want to risk overwriting any data in case it failed.

I woke up yesterday and all of my media (pictures, videos, music, etc.) that I had stored on a secondary drive had just disappeared. I was able to retrieve the majority of the data via recovery software but now I am unable to open any of the files that were recovered. Whenever I attempt to open a fi...