Any good recommendations for restoring data on a partly formatted 500GB drive? Preferably that support portable installations?
Transferring pictures from the E:\ drive SSD on my PC to a USB stick, and started to format the E:\ drive instead of the USB! I noticed the warning, but somehow hit "OK" instead of "Cancel'.
Immediately turned off the PC to minimise any actual data loss, but now have nearly 300GB of data to recover. I have a backup, but it's at least a couple of months old now, so lots of my daughter's photographs haven't got there yet.
I've used EaseUS free for odd file recovery in the past, and a trial of the paid version is currently scanning the disk with an hour to run to see what it can find. While I don't mind paying for that if it finds all the files and can restore the formatting as well, I'd prefer something portable, rather than installed on the C:\ drive of a machine that I'm planing to rebuild next year. Any suggestions?
First thing - "Touch Nowt" don't write anything to it, or even try to copy files from it etc, but first image it, I use Macrium Reflect Free, but not portable.
To recover I have used AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard (free but not portable)
I have also used Partiton Guru (free but not portable and you may already have this as it is from EASSOS?) and what I found most successful was MiniTool Partition Assistant (again free but not portable and the free version will only list what it found, you have to pay to recover)
There is at least one 'portable' solutoion I used and I think that was called Recova - but it was ever so slow, and not as good as those mentioned above. Most of the files that were 'recovered' came back with unhelpful file names eg 'filecheck001, filecheck002.........filecheck00n) and there were 1000s of them
For this sort of job I bought one of those devices that you can slot a drive into, there are usually 2 slots so you can do disk cloning (which you can do with Macrium Reflect)
Best of luck - I feel your pain, we've all done instead of using a carpenter's old wisdom - "Measure twice, cut once"
Last edited by OneWorld on Sat Dec 29, 2018 4:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I've just explored AOMEI. It reckons the partition per se is OK, and so I need to use a data recovery tool to retrieve the data. That said it is a pretty powerful tool, so I'll bookmark that for future reference.
A colleague not on this forum made the same comment about Recuva - slow. EaseUS seems to have found all the files with only 11 for which it can't identify the original folder, which is pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
I've found a code for 50% off EeaseUS which brings the cost down to 42GBP. (I just searched and found several). Still an expensive mistake, but at least the files are now all copying over onto a spare HDD.
I'm so worried about doing this kind of thing that I really try to minimise user cockups on my end - I disconnect/remove/unmount *all* unnecessary drives before the procedure so that I *can't* accidentally trash/erase/format/partition/overwrite the wrong drive.
And even then, I make very sure, triple-checking the correct source/target drives etc before hitting go - and usually check again during the "are you sure" phase.
Basically, I'm assuming cockups are so easy to happen that they probably already have, and thus I have a correction phase to make sure any previous errors are found and cleaned up before going any further...
Hope the restore goes well - it seems you had some fortune with what you can recover, which is always a massive relief!
Last edited by muzines on Sat Dec 29, 2018 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I am usually super-careful as well, so I can only blame a post-Christmas fug.
The files are restoring, so that's good.
What is not good is that I have just checked the normal backup USB, and it appears to be completely empty! So now I am entirely dependent on this restore working, otherwise I am sleeping in the shed.
I sleep a bit easier since I signed-up for Backblaze. It runs in the background continuously writing copies of every new/changed file to cloud storage. If I delete a file Backblaze keeps it for a fortnight so I have a safety net.
I've only had to invoke the retrieve once for 3 files and it was painless. If you delete lots of files they have various options for getting all of them to you asap - not relying on downloading from the cloud. Costs me about £50 a year. Price has risen since the pound has tumbled against the dollar...
There are mixed views here about Backblaze and similar schemes - as may become apparent in subsequent responses! All I can say is that as long as you have reasonably respectable Internet speeds I've not found it to be problematic. I have about 700GB of files managed by Backblaze... initial upload took about 5 days, but it may have been about 500 GB back then...
Thanks Mike, Not heard of Backblaze, so that's another thing to check out.
Just for reference and to close out this thread:, EaseUS did exactly what it said it would, and I can recommend it to other fat-fingered buffoons.
It installed on C:, and recovered everythign on the E: data drive. It found all the files on E: in the folders, plus another 100GB or so which it listed as "Tag", which seemed to be duplicates of the folder files which had been tagged in some way (e.g. Nikon CoolPix). Whether these were previously deleted files, or the same file listed twice I wasn't able to establish for sure. Having listed all the recoverable files it then saved them all out to an external drive, ready to copy back across to the formatted data drive.
Whether it would work had I tried to format the O\S disk is another matter. I do have a bootable recovery drive with Windows on, so perhaps I should have tried installing to that for a "portable-ish" installation for the next time.
Backblaze user here too. For what it costs it's a good option.
I have a string of backup processes, working continuously, overnight and weekly, as appropriate, with Backblaze at the end of the chain to catch everything.
Interesting thread. Glad to hear you're recovery went well! Like Desmond, I only connect drives when in use. I also do full weekly and daily incremental back ups and, less regularly will literally copy my important content onto a separate disk for archival purposes so all of my data is backed up and duplicated, most of it more than once. All because I lost everything once.
Last edited by Watchmaker on Mon Dec 31, 2018 1:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Backblaze is of interest to me but only if there is something like it that sends files to another drive rather than a cloud.
This would be for my son who does not at present have a reliable internet service (would be of little use to me either with my present 0.7M upload speed?)
He has a pretty swift 1TB USB 3.0 drive and I can get him another when it is stuffed.
Dave.
Last edited by ef37a on Mon Dec 31, 2018 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Backblaze is of interest to me but only if there is something like it that sends files to another drive rather than a cloud.
That's another very good idea.
I think Acronis make softwre which does this. I have only used their disk copy tool to clone an O/S drive onto SSD when upgrading the PC, but I recall it was straightforward, and well documented. I shall check that out too.
Backblaze is of interest to me but only if there is something like it that sends files to another drive rather than a cloud.
That's another very good idea.
I think Acronis make softwre which does this. I have only used their disk copy tool to clone an O/S drive onto SSD when upgrading the PC, but I recall it was straightforward, and well documented. I shall check that out too.
Woo!Hoo! Thanks Doc! I rarely get told I have had a good idea and NEVER about computer matters.
Happy New Year all. How are heads? I am ok, medically enforced sobriety.
I thought EaseUS had recovered all my files correctly. However it seems that MOST OF THEM ARE CORRUPTED.
They are OK up to a point halfway through one folder,then after that not a single one opens properly. In fact you can see the last image which opens OK, then everything in subsequent folders won't open or preview. The last seven years are corrupt.
Since I have copied all the files back from the USB drives onto the original disk, I can't try to recover them again from there. Clearly every file I checked the first time was an earlier one.
Now I almost certainly need specialist help. And I retract my earlier recommendation of EaseUS.
So now I am entirely dependent on this restore working, otherwise I am sleeping in the shed.
