Data Recovery

[edwinhess]

OK so I went to reinstall windows, I accidentally reformatted my back up drive with all my pics on it installed windows and a some programs and used my computer for a week before I realized this. So my question is How do i get my pics back? Software or a data recovery company? How much is this going to cost me? The pics are priceless if I have them back the way they were. Ive searched google and came across a couple companies but not a solid price and I don't want to waste money on software that's not going to work. Any suggestions would be GREAT!!!!

 

[sminlal]

You said you reformatted your "back up drive". This implies that you have another copy of the pictures somewhere?

Most data recovery depends on the data having been deleted, but not overwritten. If you overwrote the only copy of your pictures with a installation of windows then I strongly, strongly doubt you'll be able to recover much if anything. They say the CIA has ways to recover data that's been overwritten, but I doubt they'd be willing to help you...

If your disk was pretty full before you installed windows on top of it, and if it's now a lot less full, then some of the old files may not yet have been overwritten and you MAY be able to recover some of them. I think this might be beyond the ken of normal recovery software, though...

This is a perfect example of (a) why RAID is not a backup, and (b) why a good backup strategy always includes two offline copies of your data, one of which is offsite.

 

[chunkymonster]

Check out www.runtime.org and read about an application called GetDataBack for NTFS.

This application is designed for instances like this. You can dl it for free to see if it will recover your data but then you have to pay for a license key to enable the recovery portion of the app.

I've used GetDataBack a few times as a result of my own shenanigans with much success.

Good luck!

 

[edwinhess]

I wish I had a back up of my back up but I dont,Thanx for the help!!