What's the stupidist thing you could do....

[Phil Lilley]

Put everything- I mean everything- pictures, doc files, maps, emails... on an external hard drive "to keep it safe". . . .. .and then reformat the hard drive. I left the drive plugged into a laptop I was reinstalling windows on and picked the wrong drive to format.

I cried.

It hasn't been a good day.

Then my son-in-law gave me a website-

http://recovermyfiles.com

Downloaded the first program free and is running as I type. Been running for 3 hours and still looking for 'deleted' files on the hd. If this works I'll gladly pay a million dollars to get them back.

If this works... I could have recovered those San Juan pics I deleted last fall of our fishing trip and John Johnson and his biggest trout (hope he doesn't read this!).

[gonefishin]

Phil: There is a program named FileSaver that is great for undeleting files. I used it to restore files from one of my hard drives that had been formatted. It worked great and I could not believe the files that it would undelete. Some of them were 5 years old and more!!

www.File-Saver.com

[SGFChief]

Ouch

If you truly did a format on a drive like you intended to do a new install, there may be nothing you can do about it. Keep trying and let us know if it works.

I learned my lesson the hard way a year ago when my hard drive refused to boot any longer. I ended up hooking the old drive as a slave on another PC and was able to get my digital photos, websites and other important docs off it using dos commands but it took hours to complete.

I now use a another hard drive to run a backup every day (usually late at night)--in the case of your laptop you could use an external USB2 hardrive, firewire drive or even something so simple as another PC on your network. I transfer a copy of the files each night with a free program called Cobian Backup 8

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

It's dumb simple to use and will even go as far emailing you the results of the backup to you once it is complete. It's so dependable we even use it on some of our servers at work backing up multiple days worth of data in the case of a version of the db going corrupt, you could reinstall the previous known working version.

It may be too late to help you now but to answer your question about the stupidest thing you could do would be... it would be to let it happen again.

best of luck.

Mike

[Kansas Fly Fisher]

OUCH! Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt. I know what you're going through and hope for the best. I agree with Mike though, the stupidest thing would be to let it happen again.

John

[Phil Lilley]

I got back almost all of it. But it's all single, unnamed files in one folder.

Went to WalMart last night and bought another external drive. This one is going on the shelf after I back up everything. Lightning won't even be able to get it unless it's a direct hit.

Thanks

[Samkam1]

I have found that the best way to be safe is to back up your files to an offsite location. Cheap and easy! www.undergroundbackups.com

[jOrOb]

A single format should prove no problem. Recover my files works great, but unfortunately often loses the directory structure.

There is a company called Drivesavers that can retrieve your data even if the drive is defective, but at a price. The average price for a recovery is about $3000.

Unfortunately, they don't always get the directory structure, so you are probably as well off now as you are going to get.

[Rolan Duffield]

I just received the Sept. 2006 issue of Consumer Reports. You might want to read these reports.

Included is the article "10 Simple systems that back up valuable data."

Also Best tools to stop Viruses, Spam and Spyware.

[strangercreek]

I do a great deal of this out in the field and have been using a product called "Ontrack Recovery". Unlike some of the other programs, it restores files and folders under their original names (it also performs some other functions). There should be a trial version available, otherwise the main product is around $1,000. It does a very good job though. www.ontrack.com