Bleh. Formatted my 12TB drive by accident when installing W11.

[ZeqOBpf6]

In my defense I had seen the "select which partitions you want to format" screen like 30 times that day at work.

The bad
The drive was fully encrypted with Veracrypt
When I was using Linux I was accessing the drive, not sure if that matters. It was NTFS for sure.

The good
I was able to mount the drive in Veracrypt by using disk manager, converting the drive to RAW, not formatting it, and then mount it in VC using the backup header embedded.(!!)
When I formatted it I haven't done any writing to it.


Where I'm at now, is with the drive mounted in VC, using some data recovery tools I did just a bit of research on, (Hetman and EaseUs, meh) they are finding "unnamed files" that are all huge, like 400MB jpgs, or file formats I know I never had on the drive, swf, gz, etc.

The drive was mostly stuff of my dad's band, very important to me. Definitely not afraid to throw (more) money at this, but hoping there's a solution besides sending this away for a $2,000 data recovery service.

I'm letting it run to the end this time instead of stopping halfway, I'm at 48 hours so maybe things will improve after it fully finishes? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[learners permit]

Mini tool partition wizard pro has partition recovery options. I've not used that function of it but it's very effective for everything I've thrown at it so far and not ridiculously priced.

 

[ChosenUno]

In my defense I had seen the "select which partitions you want to format" screen like 30 times that day at work.

The bad
The drive was fully encrypted with Veracrypt
When I was using Linux I was accessing the drive, not sure if that matters. It was NTFS for sure.

The good
I was able to mount the drive in Veracrypt by using disk manager, converting the drive to RAW, not formatting it, and then mount it in VC using the backup header embedded.(!!)
When I formatted it I haven't done any writing to it.


Where I'm at now, is with the drive mounted in VC, using some data recovery tools I did just a bit of research on, (Hetman and EaseUs, meh) they are finding "unnamed files" that are all huge, like 400MB jpgs, or file formats I know I never had on the drive, swf, gz, etc.

The drive was mostly stuff of my dad's band, very important to me. Definitely not afraid to throw (more) money at this, but hoping there's a solution besides sending this away for a $2,000 data recovery service.

I'm letting it run to the end this time instead of stopping halfway, I'm at 48 hours so maybe things will improve after it fully finishes? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

The very first thing I would do right now is buy another drive and do a sector copy to that drive before anything else, so that you won't be fucked if something goes sideways.