So I tanked my 750gb drive due to carelessness, the quick format was so fast that it effectively scrambled the 730+gb data on the drive to near incomprehension. R-Studio to the rescue:
That is what the recovery software was looking at after nearly 3 hours of scanning… it evaluated around 21Terrabytes of possible data combinations which I had nowhere to place.
Initially I used the N900 Central (networked personal cloud storage) as the backup location and put thousands of JPG files on it. I was doing the recovery extension by extension because I have a fair understanding of the content of the drive… all was fine until some items were not being recovered anymore and so I aborted the current recovery task.
Next I placed the files to be recovered on a local disk; this time trying several sets of recognized video extensions that would fit the free space in my local drive which really wasnt all that plenty. It worked for a bit of time but I needed to do a huge batch and so I did something risky which thankfully didn’t result in any further fiasco: I put another terradrive beside the port where the hard drive to be recovered was plugged in.
Why this is dangerous is because by my experience, putting two USB 3 devices together side by side sometimes makes both of them re-power up and that might mess up the scanned data… it was a good thing that didn’t happen this time around.
And after all the logical decisions in picking out ‘”good” items from the pile, here’s what I ended up with:
About half of which I wont be able to effectively use because they’ve lost their numbering and accompaniment subtitles which leads me to about 180 odd gigs, about a fourth of the original data, usable and available after the debacle.
For reference this is what recovered data looks like:
Denoted by numbers with no logical arrangement and with possible expanded sizes due to the reconstruction process. I was only able to recover 25% of the drive content over two days (not really) and that’s most definitely better than nothing. Here’s a very practical tip I learned and will live by from now on:
No matter how lucid you think you may be, when it comes to formatting – remove ALL the items you dont want to (accidentally) erase!
Now that I’ve made peace with losing all the compiled data from before, I’ll go on ahead and perform a slow format on the tanked drive… not a zero format, an even better and ultimately more secure way of keeping your data from prying softwares which merits its very own discussion.
Add Comment