HELP - Recover disk after formatting

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GaryK

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As per my post in the Random Irritations thread, I accidentally formatted one of my HDD's over the weekend.

Has anyone had any experience with recovery software or can recommend a decent solution?
There appear to be many vendors offering such software - both free & paid for.
I'm ok with paying for something that actually does a good job of recovering the data, as long as it's reasonably priced.

Cheers
 
What sort of format did you do, a quick format or a full one? (If you're not sure, the quick ones around about a minute, the full one takes a hell of a lot longer depending on size of disk).
 
All the info is still there then, all a 'quick' format does is erase the headers that tells the reader what is stored and where. Everything will still be there as long as you haven't written anything to the disk.
There are plenty of programs out there that will recover the data, some may even be able to rebuild the header index.
I've used recovery programs before, they're easy enough to use. Just sometimes a bit time consuming. Just google it, I'm sure there are some free ones out there.. check that they aren't limited though, some let you get so far then ask you to buy before allowing you to get everything back.

Edit: Some of these may be useful: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-data-recovery-software
 
I have used Recuva and Pandora recovery software with great success before. My one tip is to recover them onto a second drive so you aren't overwriting the files you are trying to ressurect.
 
A quick format leaves the files but changes the name of files in the 'file allocation table' by removing the first character the sector of the disk holding that file can be over-written by new data.

Dont' save anything else to the disk or it will overwrite some of the old data.
The repair software will often ask you to look at the file names and replace the first digit so they can be recovered.
 
I have run a couple of recovery tools [in analysis mode] and they are finding more than 500,000 files that can be recovered.
Next challenge is to find a suitable destination drive to recover the files to.
 
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