The Best $99 ever spent!

[RussUK]

Yesterday in a moment of tired stupidity I managed to format my audio hard drive, which contains all the working sessions in the studio, mixes and samples for my samplers.

As if that wasn't enough on telling my wife she told me 'it's because you're tired', 'tell me something I don't know' I thought and then wondered if I went to bed that when I woke up if the data would be back!

However I called my mate to tell him, who was far more helpful and allowed me to swear down the phone for several minutes as I went through the grieving process. Then he went trawling the net to see if there were any recovery programs for this kind of stupidity.

3 promised, 2 failed and one delivered - Data Rescue II from Prosoft, found everything on the drive and then restored it all back to the same folders and hey presto! So if you ever as stupid as me then get a copy of this it may just save your life, it has mine.

[filosofem]

RussUK

So if you ever as stupid as me then get a copy of this it may just save your life, it has mine.

Been there done that. Doh!

...and then had to explain it to twenty people that I'd deleted all their work. I think I could've crawled into a match box that day and still had room to stretch out in. If only I had Data Rescue II from Prosoft.



filosofem

[CV]

hey

congrats on the recovery.
Just wondering how you actually did it. I've accidently initialized drives, but data recovery didn't see any of the old files on the disk.

-CV

[ijnad51]

Just an interested ignoramus here....

How the heck does that work? Doesn't formatting a drive mean that everythings..well...gone?

Does that mean that theoritically on a 120 gb hard drive that had 100gb data on it and then was formatted, with 120 free space, that for a certain time period it containd 120 free space PLUS 100 gb data hence 220 gb on a 120 gb drive?

Or do I have it wrong....

PS: Congrats on the close call man!#

Danji

[jetson]

The files are not physically removed, they are just marked as deleted. In fact, if you continue to work using the same drive, some of the files may get written over because the space is "available".

[ijnad51]

Gotcha...so formatting the drive jsut kinda pretends to remove the files and sets them at a low priority under any new files that might come along. Didn't know that.
Thanks!
Danji

[zombie69]

I think that data recovery software like that works pretty well as long as you don't do a low level format, which from my understanding writes all 0's and 1's back to the drive and makes it like it was brand new. Now that you got your data back try a disk imaging program like norton ghost. It has saved my ass more than a few times.

[kelsey]

When formatting a drive, there are two options, a quick formatt, where the utility just writes over the existing index with a blank one. This is the quickest option, and leaves all of the data intact on the hard drive, but the computer has no way of knowing which 1's and 0's go to what files, and thinks all the spots on the drive are ready for writing, regardless of there 0 or 1 state. This is the most common formatt option, and data recovery programs can do a lot with this, as we see here.

The second option is called zeroing the drive, which takes considerably longer. This not only erases the index, but also writes 0's to all of the available spots on the drive overwriting ALL of the existing data, not just the structure. I don't know any data recovery programs on the market that can recover a zero'd drive, all though I do know it's possible, your getting into extremely expensive forensic data reconstruction which has a way to look at the 0's and know whether or not they were previously a 1 or not. It's complicated, and here is not the place to discuss it, but zeroing a drive is usually a highly effective method of erasing the data if you were to say, give the drive to someone else.

There is a third option called 7way random write, or something like that, which zeros the drive, then writes random data(0's and 1's) to the drive and repeats the proccess over and over. This is the most secure way to formatt a drive, if security is an issue, and my impression is that it's impossible to recover anything after this(although I don't know for sure). This option takes forever, and is a little excessive for most all applications. I think zeroing a drive is usually sufficient, and I figure none of my data is actually worth someone spending thousands of dollars trying to re-construct my drive(my music isn't that good )

Hope this helps some of you understand what's going on a little better and answers some questions.
Peace
K

[AverageJoe]

so you're also buying a backup drive right away too?

Good review of that restore software... I need to check it out.

[ijnad51]

Kelsey: Thanks man. Interesting and informative. Wa always a bit confused bout the formatting stuff, think I get it know.

Danji