Help! Accidentally formatted hard disk with data on it (Macintosh)

[Simon]

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.

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.

[Greenguy]

Get a PC

[Cleo]

I've had somewhat decent results with Data Rescue II from ProSoft Engineering.

[InfoGuy]

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.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Greenie

Get a PC

Naah, this was completely user error. Besides, I have a PC too, just never use it for anything except looking at how sites look on one of those things.

Originally Posted by Cleo

I've had somewhat decent results with Data Rescue II from ProSoft Engineering.

Thanks, Cleo, I'm going to download the demo of that one and give it a try to see what it says it can recover.

Originally Posted by InfoGuy

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.

No idea which kind it was, but it only took about 2 seconds to make the second partition and remount the disk when I made the mistake so maybe I can still get it back.

[cd34]

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.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by cd34

time machine has now saved me twice.

Time Machine has saved me so many times I've lost count. Just last week I spent a several hours rendering a movie. Then when I started the next render I accidentally overwrote it with the next render. Luckily Time Machine had already backed it up and it just took a few minutes to restore it.

[MeatPounder]

I'm amazed how many windows users have full shadow copy turned off

[Damian]

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?

[Simon]

Originally Posted by cd34

I hope you get your files back, but, time machine has now saved me twice.

Glad to hear your problem was solved so easily. That's why I was preparing this external drive. Unfortunately this is a case where Time Machine won't be of any use since this was an external hard drive used for backups and archiving, not an internal drive with Time Machine keeping it all safely backed up.

Originally Posted by MeatPounder

I'm amazed how many windows users have full shadow copy turned off

I'm amazed how many people use Windows.*

Originally Posted by Damian

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?

Not all of it. Some is duplicated on my other external hard drives, and in most cases the originals will be on one of my notebook computers, but since the accidentally-formatted drive was used to hold backups of data including some archives, it may have had some data that doesn't exist anywhere else.

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.

[Damian]

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...

[Cleo]

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.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Damian

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...

Damiam, I don't know you and you don't know me, so you don't have any way to know that my backup strategy has kept me safe from all data loss for 25 years now. I agree with what you're saying, Damian, but I hope you understand that offering general backup advice isn't of much help in this case. I do have an external boot drive for emergencies and for all important data I do have backups of backups of backups, three levels with at least one off-site, but this drive *may* have a few things on it which I'd still like to recover. Which is why I'll scan it first to determine that for certain before recopying the backups from other drives onto it.

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.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Cleo

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.

Thanks, Cleo, I'll take a look at that. I've bought empty drive enclosures before and swapped drives in and out of them, then stored the bare drives off-site. This could be an alternative to that, and to using enclosed drives for off-site backups.

[Damian]

Originally Posted by Simon

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.

Fair point.

But feel free to offer me any advice about magic (or online marketing) you may have, whenever you like. I love to learn.

[Simon]

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.