Accidentally deleted a HDD

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grilledcheese

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 18, 2010
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OK I really need help I deleted a 1 TB HDD worth of Movie's. And I need a program to get them back! Now a month ago I used "recover my file's" program and it found all of em, but I didn't had a empty HDD to use to get them back. Now I do but the program ctd now. Could anyone help?
 
crash to desktop?

OP: just google file recovery , or undelete program.. there should be tons of them to try
 
I had a little "accident" a couple of days ago, deleted several GB's of HD movies and ISOs, GetDataback found NOTHING...recuva less than nothing and so on, found a little utillity called "restoration" and in minutes it recovered all my stuff without issues, even the deleted ISOs passed the checksums verification.
 
tried restoration it found nothing but broken useless files and not even all of them. Recover My files does it 100% BUT it cost 80.00 and that's to much for me for a Program right now.
 
grilledcheese said:
tried restoration it found nothing but broken useless files and not even all of them. Recover My files does it 100% BUT it cost 80.00 and that's to much for me for a Program right now.
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have you used the hdd since you accidently wiped it?
 
Before you do anything else to the drive, go buy a drive of equal or larder size, and DD the entire drive to it, work on that drive and keep the original safe. I can't offer much advice on how to recover the entire drive as I've never been faced with that, but formatting does erase all the indexes and such so it will take more than a partition recovery program or playing with the partition table. You'll probably need a file level undelete which will search for file data and try to detect the start/end of each file.

If you used full format, I think that physically erases the files so that is much more serious.

That reminds me, my p2p folder is one of the only parts of my raid array that I don't backup. I probably should. :D
 
From what I know.. as long as you do not write any data.. every byte of data should be recoverable. I have used getdataback pro.. and it has done the job before. As far as formatting though.. an undelete program should be able to survive a full format, but I do not know about 2 of them. How did you format twice on such an important drive?
 
the drive was formatted once thus my need to get it back. also i meant the drive was formatted once when it was new, once by accident.
 
Then you should be fine if it was formatted with all your data on it.. and you haven't written anything to it since.
 
Hi,
I have had the same problem.. had the flu formatted my friends HD, the drive i formatted was actually mine, where i deleted the partition and reformatted the drive again unknownly deleted 12TB( man was i pissed off).

Rule of theumb when formatting a drive do not do it, when your sick.

Ok so onto the recovery..
i did not write anything to the drive.. used get databack.. saw some files but not all.

The programme that retrieved all my data back was active partition recovery and active file recovery.

when you have done a deep scan which takes hours, save the results and then start working.

Works incredebly well....
 
grilledcheese said:
tried restoration it found nothing but broken useless files and not even all of them. Recover My files does it 100% BUT it cost 80.00 and that's to much for me for a Program right now.
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TPB has several versions, but I assume you don't believe in that. So basically you are looking for a free recovery program. How about testdisk and photorec? I just used testdisk to restore an NTFS master file table from the mirror. I don't know of any other program that can do that. Well, aside from chkdsk when it works. It's an interesting program. Other than that, the only free recovery program I know of is Recuva. However a data recovery program is an important piece of software to own. If I weren't such a pirate I'd buy a copy myself. In fact I probably will as soon as I definitively figure out which one is best. Some are as little as $40. Recover my files is definitely overpriced. And I hear it's slower than most recovery programs. Which is fine if it does a better job, but I haven't heard that it does. I do plan to test it though. GetDataBack is definitely good. It has been saving my ass for many years now. It has been around for a long time. Then there's Ontrack EasyRecovery, which has a feature for scanning for file patterns without the aid of an intact master file table. I guess it looks for file headers as fingerprints for common file types. GetDataBack can also search for files without an $MFT, but I'm not sure how it works. I've never used EasyRecovery, but I plan to test it out soon. There is also Spinrite and HDD Regenerator for bad sector problems.

Note that in order to actually test most of these paid programs without buying them first, you have to pirate them and not all are even available. Although the ones mentioned in this thread are. Most demo versions limit you to 3-5 recovered files or very small files or even none at all. GetDataBack does not let you actually recover any files in demo mode, but it will let you attempt to run the files directly from the recovery tree to make sure that they were recovered properly. I think this is a stupid, short sighted policy on the part of the software developers. There is no way to know if the program is any good until you try it, but they won't let you really try it. At least not legally. BTW I just checked and it looks like Recover My Files doesn't let you save in demo mode. So how do you know it would have worked if you weren't able to try saving files? Does it let you run them like GetDataBack? I've used some recovery programs where it looks like lots of files will be recovered but when you click on them you find that 90% are corrupted and won't even open.
 
gojirasan said:
Note that in order to actually test most of these paid programs without buying them first, you have to pirate them and not all are even available. Although the ones mentioned in this thread are. Most demo versions limit you to 3-5 recovered files or very small files or even none at all. GetDataBack does not let you actually recover any files in demo mode, but it will let you attempt to run the files directly from the recovery tree to make sure that they were recovered properly. I think this is a stupid, short sighted policy on the part of the software developers. There is no way to know if the program is any good until you try it, but they won't let you really try it. At least not legally. BTW I just checked and it looks like Recover My Files doesn't let you save in demo mode. So how do you know it would have worked if you weren't able to try saving files? Does it let you run them like GetDataBack? I've used some recovery programs where it looks like lots of files will be recovered but when you click on them you find that 90% are corrupted and won't even open.
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I understand the limited demo. It's a catch-22..

Most users will only have to use the software once or twice, so if the company provides a "fully functional" demo then no one will ever pay them for it. They will just download the demo, recover their files then continue on their merry way. Unless you are a tech then it's not a piece of software one would use on a regular basis.

I don't think $80 is too much to pay if the software works (Therein lies the kicker). Pricing is usually tied to value and the question you need to ask is "What is the value of my data?". Most likely:

1) You're buying the software because you need recovery and the files are already missing.

2) How much is your data worth? Most of the time $80 is a small price to pay for getting back irreplaceable family videos, photos, corporate documents, etc. Basically, if it's going to take more than an hour to recover the files then it's worth $80.

3) Sometimes a job or contract can be on the line. If a potential new customer called me for help I'd be more than happy to drop $80 and recover their files for the chance of making thousands of dollars in the future.

4) You're way past pucker factor 10..

You should check out the pricing structure Ontrack uses. You pay $199 for EasyRecovery and you only get to use it 20 times. PowerControls is even more expensive. However, when companies like DriveSavers charge $3500 to recover drives, that seems cheap. Though nothing is as frustrating as the DriveSavers tech telling you less than 24 hours after receiving your drive "Yeah, we were able to recover 100% of your files. They're all on a drive here in front of me. Want it back? Okay, that'll be $3500, but you get a 10% discount!"..

:p

Riley
 
I understand the limited demo. It's a catch-22..

Most users will only have to use the software once or twice, so if the company provides a "fully functional" demo then no one will ever pay them for it. They will just download the demo, recover their files then continue on their merry way. Unless you are a tech then it's not a piece of software one would use on a regular basis.
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Fully Agreed.


You should check out the pricing structure Ontrack uses. You pay $199 for EasyRecovery and you only get to use it 20 times. PowerControls is even more expensive. However, when companies like DriveSavers charge $3500 to recover drives, that seems cheap. Though nothing is as frustrating as the DriveSavers tech telling you less than 24 hours after receiving your drive "Yeah, we were able to recover 100% of your files. They're all on a drive here in front of me. Want it back? Okay, that'll be $3500, but you get a 10% discount!"..
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These services are lot more extensive than what you can do with software. I mean they can take totally dead drives and read the bits of the media and reconstruct that onto a new drive. The problem there is not the effort of recovery but the cost of the machinery and the low volume.
 
Skud said:
Most users will only have to use the software once or twice, so if the company provides a "fully functional" demo then no one will ever pay them for it. They will just download the demo, recover their files then continue on their merry way. Unless you are a tech then it's not a piece of software one would use on a regular basis.
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Or they will do like I did and just download a torrent rather than pay for a piece of software which they cannot fully test. Paying $40 for software which may not work is bad enough. But paying $80 is an insane act of desperation. As I said, GetDataBack has a solution to your catch-22 scenario, which all the other devs should follow. They let you test your files to see if they work without actually saving them to disk. In that way you really can get a good idea of what the software can do before putting down your $80 (GetDataBack is also $80).

I don't think $80 is too much to pay if the software works (Therein lies the kicker).
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I agree, but only because you are going to be able to use the software for more than just that one emergency. Because that one data loss may or may not be worth $80 to someone depending on what kind of data it was. Most data is just not that valuable, although it obviously depends on how much you value your time because replacing the data will at the very least take time.

Still, there are cheaper options and even free options that may work just as well. Especially in the kind of one-time scenario that you are describing. Now, it could be a situation where someone has already tried the free options without results and they are looking for something better. Well, if I am not able to truly test the functionality of any of the programs, I will logically choose the cheapest programs first. And there are a lot of recovery programs cheaper than $80. Of course GetDataBack is sufficiently testable IMO. So I would not rule that out even though it costs twice what some of the competitors do.

Active@ File Recovery only costs $35 and someone in another thread said it worked better for them than GetDataBack. Systweak's Advanced Disk Recovery is $40 and looks promising, but I can't test it because the demo is too limited and there are no torrents for it. What do they expect me to do? Buy it based on a blurb on their web page? I just don't understand that logic at all. TestDisk/PhotoRec and Recuva are free. I think the $80 programs really need to justify their higher cost and they really can't unless you can compare it to other programs, which you can't do without buying all of them.

2) How much is your data worth? Most of the time $80 is a small price to pay for getting back irreplaceable family videos, photos, corporate documents, etc. Basically, if it's going to take more than an hour to recover the files then it's worth $80.
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Most of the time the data is not all that irreplaceable. As you say, in some cases it just takes time to replace. And an hour of my time is worth a lot less than $80. It usually takes me about 13 hours of unpleasant work to make that much money. For truly irreplaceable data of course it is "worth" $80, even to someone who makes a lot less than $80 an hour after taxes. But, again, in my experience, and I have had a lot of drive failures and data loss, most of the time the data is replaceable.

3) Sometimes a job or contract can be on the line. If a potential new customer called me for help I'd be more than happy to drop $80 and recover their files for the chance of making thousands of dollars in the future.
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Well that is a special case. Not every data loss involves a business situation. But in that case, yes. $80 is a no-brainer.

You should check out the pricing structure Ontrack uses. You pay $199 for EasyRecovery and you only get to use it 20 times. PowerControls is even more expensive.
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Now *that* is truly insane. Looks like I'll cross that off my list of legit purchases. I just checked their web page and they don't even give you a price. You are supposed to contact them for a price. Sounds like an "if you have to ask" scenario. But my copy of EasyRecovery has no such limitations. It doesn't seem to me that EasyRecovery is any better than some of the $35 - $80 competition. They are pricing themselves out of the consumer market entirely. They probably want to sell only to publicly owned corporations, which I bet is mainly what happens. It's easier to justify that kind of expense when it's not your money.

However, when companies like DriveSavers charge $3500 to recover drives, that seems cheap.
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You are comparing software to a service that involves human labor and lots of it. And specialized skills and equipment. That doesn't come cheap. Especially in this country. 99.9999% of people would not pay $3500 to recover even "irreplaceable" data. At that price most people wouldn't care about losing the data. To me $3500 is such a huge amount that it may as well be $35,000 or just an infinite amount of money. I get the impression that pretty much only large companies use professional data recovery services. It's simply not an option for the vast majority of people. You may as well compare using psychic powers or magic to recover your data. The service is so expensive it may as well not exist at all for most people.
 
BTW, when I hear all this talk about trying multiple software recovery options I would urge the users to make a bit for bit copy of the hard drive to a new disk (and work off the new disk) before attempting recovery so that 1 program does not destroy your data leaving further software recovery nearly impossible.
 
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