Help! Accidentally formatted hard disk with data on it (Macintosh)
I made an idiot mistake and formatted an external 1.4 TB hard drive that had data on it. I meant to just reserve a new partition via Disk Utility for use by Time Machine backups but accidentally erased all 250 GB of existing data on the external drive too. |cry|
I didn't do any kind of secure erase, so I'm pretty sure all of the data is right there but all the pointers to it are gone. Looking online at Apple support and other links found via Google it seems these are the four utility programs most often suggested for recovering data lost this way: FileSalvage v6.1.5 from SubRosaSoft Data Rescue II from ProSoft Engineering Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery v4.0 from Stellar Data Recovery File Recovery for Mac from AppleXsoft Price is just under $100 for any of them, so before I buy one I thought I'd see if anyone has used any of them, been happy or unhappy with the results, or has any other suggestions for data recovery on Macintosh. Cleo? cd34? anyone..? Note: I have not touched the external drive since accidentally formatting it. Nothing has been copied to it, so everything should still be right where it was. |
Get a PC |couch|
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I've had somewhat decent results with Data Rescue II from ProSoft Engineering.
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Do you do a quick format or a standard format? If the first, you probably just wiped the directory and have a reasonable chance of recovering your data. If the latter, you're probably f*d.
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went to the data center today, got back, laptop was warm (should have gone to sleep), opened it up, black screen. power cycled, got the file folder with the ?.
41 minutes later, after a reinstall & restore from time machine, I restart firefox, it tells me that it must have crashed, asked to restore my tabs, and I'm back up and running. I hope you get your files back, but, time machine has now saved me twice. |
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I'm amazed how many windows users have full shadow copy turned off
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Data Rescue 2 is meant to be good.
Or, you just use the back up of the data you lost. You *do* have that backed up right? |
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At this point I'm looking to scan the drive and see exactly what's on it that I'd want to recover. Some of what's on there I don't really need to recover if I have good copies somewhere else. But I think there are some things on there I'd like to get back. ProSoft sent me the download link for the Data Rescue II demo so I'll be running that this morning. Hopefully it'll show me what it could recover if I had the full version and I can see what's still there. * I say this as someone who just spent days upgrading and tweaking a Toshiba notebook running Windows XP. I've used both, but I only use Windows when I absolutely have no other choice or want to see check out a site using it. |
Wow.
Dude, drives are so so so so cheap now, for me, there really is no excuse for not having the following: - main drive - mirrored bootable backup of that drive (so you can carry on working when your drive dies) - cloud storage back up (so you can access your shit whereever you are) - physical off site back up (for when your place is robbed or burns down) How much would the 250 gig of content you might have just lost cost to replace? I wager more than the 20 bucks a spare 250 gig drive would cost! I know this isn't helping you and I'm not meaning to sound harsh but if you don't have a back up and redundancy for that back up, when drives are so damn cheap then it's a bit silly, really. :) Let us know how the recovery goes though... |
I've been buy drives without an encloser for storing backups off site and using This Device to connect them as needed. It's slow but doesn't matter since its just off site backups and archives.
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I asked for feedback on data recovery software for Macintosh users since I haven't had a need to recover any lost data for so long that I'm not sure which ones are the best today. I didn't ask for input on what I should be doing to protect my existing data since I do know how to do that. Anyway, I promise not to come to webmaster shows and tell you all about the generally accepted strategies magicians should always use to ensure that the crowd can't discover how you do your tricks. In exchange I'd ask that you offer advice on my specific questions if you have some, but keep the general backup strategy advice ready in case someone else asks for it. I think we'll both come off looking a bit better that way. :) |
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But feel free to offer me any advice about magic (or online marketing) you may have, whenever you like. I love to learn. |
No worries there, Damian, actually I love to learn things I don't know too. It's just that when I'm trying to learn specifically about one aspect of the French Revolution and get advice about why studying history is important that my hackles rise just a little.
:) |
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