cgsecurity.org

I have a 128gb Toshiba flash disk in fat32 format, I used it to store videos
recently I plugged it in and everything was gone, except for a few system files for the drive , yet it could still read and write files
allocated space also showed it as completely empty too, so i tried PhotoRec , but foolishly set the extraction destination to my C: drive that is nearly full
so after about 5 minutes it had recovered about 12 files, left it on overnight and had recovered about 70, before saying it had run out of space

So I re-did it and set it to extract to a drive that has more than enough free space, but only extracted 1 weird text file after a few minutes
I changed it to "free" instead of "whole" but after an hour it has only extracted 1 video file and 5 weird corrupted text files

Am i unable to extract the same files twice or something? I can kind of tell I'm missing some things but also assumed that trying to recover the same drive twice would output the same results

thank you in advance as i am not very experienced in file systems or data recovery

Storage devices break. They can break from one moment to another or they can break slowly.
Suspicious disks should be duplicated using ddrescue as described in the manual to ensure a healthy state of the duplicate without any physical problems so that rerunning any data recovery software gives the same results.

does this mean that i cannot recover any more data? or would it still be useful to try and make a duplicate

I don't know. I can't foresee.