File recovery from HDD?

[smurph]

I will explain my situation as best i can....during improving my system with an SSD,, and cleaning up my HDDs, I stupidly & accidentally re-formatted my 4TB drive.
This was nearly full! ~3.8Tb of all my personal, files over 20 years, including music and movies etc.

I have tried several programs to recover such as Testdisk, Aidfile & Recuva all with differing results.

Note that a disk scan takes ~10 hours.
The first several failed, due win updates installing…..which I have since disabled!

Anyway, I first tried Testdisk, and couldn't follow it whatsoever...as I found it highly complicated and totally unintuitive.
Next tried Aidfile, and it spat a lot of complicated gobbledygook files, that I couldn't see recovered files in.
Then Recuva, which I amusing and I has found a large majority of the files, all in a random order, and produces ~10Tb of files!


So, I am looking for recommendations for the best recovery software that will find my files, and if possible preferably sort in original folders, and not provide results of up to 10Tb!
I have 2 x 2Tb tp store recovered data.
This will need to be done in stages also, so can repeat scans be conducted?

 

[-RockMan-]

To be honest with you, you have a slim chance of getting back all of your files.
Use recuva deep scan again, start out by searching for your basic documents like .doc .txt or .bitmap.
If the program sees the file health as green, take them, if the program sees at as yellow or red...
You would be best to not recover it, it is showing as damaged and unstable.

If you don't like that option, you'll need file recovery service and a good place to start would be your hdd manufacturer.
Ask them through technical support on the phone if they do that.
Ask them how much will they charge during warrenty service with them and without warrenty.

If the files are not on the hard drives platter anymore your out of luck.

 

[smurph]

Thanks, but most of the files are there, in Revuca i see ~65050!
Its just that there are unorganised, and are at 10Tb!
That is why i am looking for better software that may improve the recovery, in original folders, and down nearer the correct data amount.

 

[-RockMan-]

Thanks, but most of the files are there, in Revuca i see ~65050!
Its just that there are unorganised, and are at 10Tb!
That is why i am looking for better software that may improve the recovery, in original folders, and down nearer the correct data amount.

If you have 10 tb worth of data, you maybe at it for awhile trying to get those files back.
This could work TestDisk - CGSecurity
Read the instructions and follow what it says to do.
If that doesn't recover your data your option left is to call a data recovery service.
Are all the drives in good working order or not ?
If so proceed and get back what you want, if not becafefull and take back what data you trully need now.

I know of someone on here who could help you out but I'm iffy on his expertise on drive storage and recovery.
Keep in touch so I can know whats going on.

 

[carnageX]

Thanks, but most of the files are there, in Revuca i see ~65050!
Its just that there are unorganised, and are at 10Tb!
That is why i am looking for better software that may improve the recovery, in original folders, and down nearer the correct data amount.

Sounds like it's finding files that were previously deleted as well, giving the impression of there being more data on the drive then there actually is.

Scan with Recuva, and sort files that are non-corrupted (ones that have a green-light icon next to them). Go through those files and see if you can tell which ones are ones that you would like to recover. May be a pain and take a while... but probably going to be your best shot.

Also make sure you're not trying to save ANYTHING to the drive you've formatted before you've recovered everything you want. Once a drive has been formatted, it doesn't actually delete the contents, but it marks them as writable again, and when data is written to the drive, it will overwrite the spots marked as "free". In other words, you'll want to recover the data from the 3TB drive onto another, separate drive.

 

[mud beaver]

I did this a while ago with a 500GB HDD i had and it drove me crazy but if you formatted the drive then you arent going to get your stuff back unless you pay a company a lot of money to try and even then there is no 100% guarentee they can even do it

 

[carnageX]

I did this a while ago with a 500GB HDD i had and it drove me crazy but if you formatted the drive then you arent going to get your stuff back unless you pay a company a lot of money to try and even then there is no 100% guarentee they can even do it

Read my above post on how formatting a platter-based HDD works .

You can recover files if no other data is written to the drive.

 

[smurph]

Thanks Rockman - will try CGS.
mud beaver - you clearly haven't read answers in this thread, nor understand re data recovery, and I'm the newbie at this!
carnageX - no data was written onto it post format, and will try to recover data to other HDDs.
Will keep you posted, though this its holiday time, and this will be a long process.
Hence why I am looking the best software, even paid for, to save me time, and try to recover foes into original folders etc.

 

[carnageX]

Thanks Rockman - will try CGS.
mud beaver - you clearly haven't read answers in this thread, nor understand re data recovery, and I'm the newbie at this!
carnageX - no data was written onto it post format, and will try to recover data to other HDDs.
Will keep you posted, though this its holiday time, and this will be a long process.
Hence why I am looking the best software, even paid for, to save me time, and try to recover foes into original folders etc.

Generally Recuva is rated as one of the best free; saw some articles that rated TestDisk as 2nd (by a fair margin).

Some more articles:
Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Five data recovery utilities - TechRepublic

 

[mud beaver]

sorry man, just going by what I was told when I did the same thing a while back.

I hope you get your files back