PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I made a bummer. I formatted the wrong hard drive. It was just a quick format and nothing has been written to the drive since. Data recovery software appear to be a jungle. Do any of you have good experience with recovering a partition which among other things (lots of music and some documents) will retrieve all of the data?

Has noone had to do such a thing? You are good people who do back-ups The crazy thing is, that this happened to me, because I made an error during my back up procedure.

All I need to know is which sofware is good at retrieving the special file extensions that Scope uses. Apparently not all recovery software sees all the file types.

I used GetDataBack with success and it restores completely an hard disk after a failure.

I can also vouch for GetDataBack, which has worked for me on a few occasions in the past.

More recently I bought a copy of UFS Explorer Standard Recovery, which I was really impressed by, as it can recover data from most standard filesystems, including Mac and Linux. Very good value at €40.

Does GetBackData and UFS Explorer Standard Recovery also restore the original tree structure and the file names?

W_ellis, why did you buy UFS Explorer Standard Recovery, when you already had GetBackData. Was there something GetBackData didn't do well enough?

GDB is only for FAT or NTFS file systems. My sister had an issue with a Mac OS formatted drive, so GDB wouldn't work for that, hence buying the UFS one.

Given UFS is cheaper and covers more, I would suggest going for that. You can try either out for free anyway, although they usually don't let you restore. They both preserve the original folder structure for the files.

I've recovered data using Recuva. The most difficult thing comes when you try to restore files, but there may be multiple versions of the same file. Recuva didn't handle that super well, but it does also do flash drives, which is what I've used mostly.

If you have yet another drive, you can try recovering the data from the formatted drive onto a second drive, and taht way you don't mess with the drive under recovery at all. Then you can see which software works easiest/best for your situation.

You can also look into the Linux CD boot drives for recovery. That's what I've used (long ago), and they are the most powerful I've used.

Thanks for all you answers

I use Ontrack Easy recovery Pro that I found it has very good results

I asked for your experience, so I will share mine too now.

I tried Recuva, but it put almost everything in a folder called ?

Then I tried UFS Explorer Standard Recovery but I still did not get the results I wanted.

Then I tried GetDataBack, and it saw two MTFs on the hard drive. And when I choose the older one, it found my files in their original tree structure. This was half a TB of data, so I can not say for sure that I got everything. And I have not tested if all the files are ok. But so far, it looks good I will just keep my old drive in a drawer for safety. 640 GB of space isn't that expensive anymore anyway. I am happy for the advice you guys gave me