Email Recovery for Thunderbird takes too long to analyze a corrupted hard disk in the email scanner mode. Is it normal?

Email Scanner is a part of Email Recovery for Thunderbird, email recovery software product. Its performance can vary depending on a number of causes. This article explains what can affect the email scanner's performance.

Entrusted with a task to recover deleted emails, Email Recovery for Thunderbird's Email Scanner employs a sophisticated scanning algorithm. It allows recovery of the maximum possible amount of the lost data even in the most unfavorable situations, such as when a hard disk crashed or has been formatted. Considerable time taken by the email recovery is a price paid for the high quality of the job. Besides, a number of factors can directly affect the time of the email recovery process.

A selected scanning mode, the actual size of a hard disk, a PC's overall performance, etc. can influence the time required for the emails recovery process. Obviously, it will be faster to recover emails in the storage scanning mode, than when an entire HDD or a logical partition is needed to be scanned.
Similarly, the time needed by the Email Scanner will depend on the type of the files that have to be restored: it will take less time to recover the emails, inadvertently deleted from the Trash folder, than after an HDD has been formatted, or a logical partition has been deleted.
To some extent, a degree of the damage of emails matters too. Thus, it is generally easier to recover emails after a Thunderbird crash, than after a hard disk crash.
The time, taken by the Email Scanner will also depend on the performance of a PC, in particular, its data storage medium (e.g. hard drive, flash drive, SSD). For example, it may take you longer to restore emails on the HDD of your laptop, than for a similar recovery process launched on your desktop, because speed characteristics of the latter are higher

One way or other, you will definitely need some patience to recover emails. In general, scanning of an average size hard disk will take up to a few hours. You will be able to follow the Email Scanner progress in the status bar at the bottom of Email Recovery for Thunderbird's interface. The results of the recovery process such as found email messages that can be restored will be listed by the program when the data analysis is complete.