Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Hey all,

This is a storage question and I apologise if this might not be at the right side of the forum.

I was tired from long sessions, under-slept, scarred from battling with a tantrum-generating 2-year old and I goofed up like I haven't before:

I currently keep a backup drive of everything. I use both CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) and Chronosync (for different tasks). System drives, SFX drives, etc., all stored in a different drive. One kept at the home studio and one at the work studio.

I have two 8TB RAID-0 drives that contain(ed) all my music libraries, VI instruments data, NI Kontakt Libraries, loops, etc.

• One of the RAID drives from the backup drive failed and I was trying to resurrect it.
• I decided to format it, use Carbon Copy Cloner and make a new backup from scratch.
• I had my main drive connected and in my tired state of being I formatted the main drive.
• Know I am left with nada. :o
• It goes without saying that I haven't used the drive for anything else and it right now sitting blank at its stage right after it was formatted.
• It has also been formatted in an exFat.

And here are a couple of questions:

Do you guys know of any Data Recovery software that can "see" the folder structure in its original, pre-formatted state to restore it in it's entirety? I have tried a couple apps already and they seem to recognise the data but bring them back in folders arranged by data type with nondescript names.

The fact that is was formatted as exFat, does it meddle at all from the previous HFS+ Journaled stated?

I am a dubbing mixer & sound editor, so my bread and butter is not in music making. So, it is not something urgent. Still a massive loss.

If anyone knows something concrete please do share it with me.

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

https://www.z-a-recovery.com

This software is amazing, I used it to recover a completely trashed NTFS drive. It had got so corrupted nothing else I tried could deal with it/repair it. It got 99% of the files back.

Good luck!
Pete

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Thanks for this Pete. It's PC only (my exFAT formatting was done by mistake, albeit I am on a MacOS system) but I might have a workaround that. I'll definitely give it a try, especially if it brings back the whole folder structure!

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Yeah, to be honest I'm not aware of anything in the Mac world that's anywhere near as capable. One thing to note, it can take HOURS to run.

Pete

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Oh, yes, you are absolutely right! It seems that 88 hours are needed in my case.

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Ha ha. The other thing to note is that when it repairs the drive (and it probably will) treat the drive as read-only and copy everything off it as soon as possible then reformat it.

Pete

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

I've had great and fast results with this tool:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download


However not sure about the RAID formats (Linux?), runs on OSX though.

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Years ago I had success with this on a RAID:

https://www.cleverfiles.com/pro.html

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Still scanning, going through billions of blocks!

Yes, I am aware of that. Thanks Pete!

Re: Data restoring from a formatted drive RAID-0 Drive
 

Thanks minister, DiskDrill will be the next one to try if what I am doing now won't work.

I've also have Data Rescue 5, Remo Recover and TestDisk queued up.