After recovery: spot-checks, hashes, and handoff notes

Recovery ends when someone else can use the data without guessing. After copying to the staging disk, open representative files: a few Office docs, archives, images, and any format your user said was critical. Corruption often shows up immediately in viewers even when the extension looks right.

For legal or archival handoffs, generate checksums (SHA-256 or org-standard) of top-level folders and store the manifest next to the export. Record source media serial, scan mode, Recuva build, operator name, and time window. That package answers the questions that arrive three weeks later.

If files fail to open, note whether the failure is consistent (every PDF) or sparse (one damaged frame in a sequence). That distinction steers the next step - another tool, a different carve, or accepting partial loss - without rerunning blind deep scans that only waste time.