Please help! Formatted my external hard drive!

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afiresinside

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Nov 14, 2014
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I know there's a million threads on this already and they all have conflicting information.

Long story short: 2TB Western Digital Portable Drive - accidentally did a Quick Format. Have not touched the drive since the format. I purchased another external drive for the recovery files.

What is the next step? What's the best software? I also read that I should make an image out of the formatted drive?

I have Macrium Reflect, should I make an image using this software? Is it read-only or is it going to accidentally write something on my formatted drive?

What is the best software? I've narrowed it down to:
- Stellar Phoenix
- R-Studio
- GetDataBack
- Recuva
- Easeus
- TestDisk

Has anyone had a high success rate with any of these? If so, what was the recovery percentage? Any corrupt files?

Thank you so much in advance. Your help and advice is appreciated.
 
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You probably do not need to image the external HDD. I have not had to use them, but many people around here have had success with GetDataBack, Recuva and Easeus. All of them have one important thing in common - they do NOT write anything to the HDD with problems, so that they cannot make things worse. But what that means is that, to recover your data, you will need (at least temporarily) another HDD large enough to receive all the recovered data. These software tools will read all they can from the troubled drive and copy it to the second drive. Once you're sure you have ALL of your files recovered on the second drive, you can re-Format the original unit and copy everything back to it.
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Paperdoc

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Oct 19, 2006
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You probably do not need to image the external HDD. I have not had to use them, but many people around here have had success with GetDataBack, Recuva and Easeus. All of them have one important thing in common - they do NOT write anything to the HDD with problems, so that they cannot make things worse. But what that means is that, to recover your data, you will need (at least temporarily) another HDD large enough to receive all the recovered data. These software tools will read all they can from the troubled drive and copy it to the second drive. Once you're sure you have ALL of your files recovered on the second drive, you can re-Format the original unit and copy everything back to it.
 
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