OK, so my lab recently moved to another building on campus, but the computer I use hadn’t been moved to the new lab. In the meantime, the idjits who took over our old lab figured they would wipe the hard drive of that computer, without checking to what group the computer originally belonged or asking if it was OK to delete the data. This has cost me about 3 months worth of programming work and data analysis. I am going to find out more in the next few days, but let’s assume (as I believe to be the case) that they formatted the hard drive but didn’t really do much else besides maybe install Windows. Is it still possible to recover my old data? Should I send it to a lab or use a software solution? About how much would it cost in each case? Any particular companies or products to recommend? Any other data recovery or otherwise relevant recommendations anybody could make right now would be very helpful. Thanks.
It really depends upon what kind of format they did. If they did a quick format, you might have some hope. That would basically mean they just wrote one byte to each sector. The equivalent of erasing a file.
There are software programs out there that will let you look at the actual drive in this case. Norton used to make one back in DOS days, when such events were more common.
If they did a low level format. . .much less likely it would be cost efficient.
I’m told there are people with very expensive equipment that could possible find somethings on a formatted drive. I do know we had a crashed drive at one point, holding our accounting files, which would have cost some $6000 to recover. We had a backup from a week earlier. . .nuff said.
Hope the new department just did a quick erase. . .then you can recover with software. Other than that, unless you’re very rich, start recoding. I would hope you have some printouts.
I suggest “Recover My Files.” So far, I’m four out of four with this program. You can download it for free, but to actually view & save any files recovered, you have to pay. I paid $80 this past summer, and it has been worth it. Since your techs probably only put Windows back on the hard drive, and you likely started using the hard drive with Windows installed in the first place, the odds are good that most of your data is still sitting on the drive.
You will need to save any recovered files to an external drive (USB thumb drive, flash drive, external hard drive, et cetera).
Go to
You might wander over to www.download.com and check out Utilities>System Utilities. They have a few programs that claim they can recover data from formatted drives. Don’t know how well they work, but it doesn’t cost anything try them.
Best of luck.