I'm hoping that it's all in one cluster to be fair, the file was about 60mb, so if I can search the binary manually, and find it myself in a hex editor I stand a chance of manually recovering.

I guess I need to create some test files, then view them in a hex editor to find the strings I need to search for.

Hi All, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, it did seem the most suitable location.

I have recently suffered a hard drive crash on one of my machines, and some sketch-up files I thought where backed up, where not.

The drive itself is actually readable, so it wasn't a "bad drive" failure, it was just that something else, corrupted the directory information, and so now there is no knowledge to windows what files where on the disk, but the file data is still there.

I have ran a surface/scan recovery program already, and as expected, all the "usual suspects" have been recovered IE: pngs, Jpgs, MP3's, wav's the stuff that all of these recovery programs (paid or free) can easily identify.

As I expected however, none of the apps I've ran so far have found anything remotely near to my model that I've been working on now (A recreation for use in a VR headset of the historic steelworks where I live)

The file has been worked on pretty much exclusively in Sketchup-Pro 2020, and IF I can figure out a byte sequence to look for I'm happy to search the image file I have made already, by hand if need be, to find the file.

However as there is little to no information, I've ever seen on the actual byte level format of an SKP file, I'm asking here to see if anyone knows or has any pointers as to what to look for.

Thanks in advance for any info anyone has.