That moment when you realize....

[Lefty]

That moment when you realize that you just formatted the portable hard drive containing your entire music collection of almost 400,000 .mp3's  (29,762 albums)!!






I just upgraded my PC to a 256Gb SSd for my OS, and two 2TB Western Digital Black HHD's in RAID 0.. and had all my stuff on three portable hard drives. I transferred everything back onto my PC after reinstalling Windows (Games, Pictures,books, etc..), but somehow missed my music folder. I then reformatted all three drives to return them back to additional storage use as needed. I didn't realize my mistake until this evening, when I went to play the new Pentatonix Christmas Album & my Music Library was totally empty!
12yrs of collecting... gone.

(I think, but have to check, that I have some of my collection backed up on some old DVD-RW's... Maybe 10-20% of my collection, if I'm lucky. It was just over 140GB of Music in all.

I feel sick 

[eXodus]

stuff happens, 


how did you format the drive ? Stop doing anything with it. The data could be still there.


If you only did the standard windows format I'm pretty sure most of it is still available.


http://www.easeus.com/resource/format-file-recovery.htm

[Rickf1985]

Exodus is right, do nothing more with that drive, at all. All a standard format does is overwrite data with ones and zeros and most decent recovery software can get back most of what is gone. BUT, the more you use it the more it will be overwritten and the more you will lose.

[eXodus]

Exodus is right, do nothing more with that drive, at all. All a standard format does is overwrite data with ones and zeros and most decent recovery software can get back most of what is gone. BUT, the more you use it the more it will be overwritten and the more you will lose.

windows format is even more lazy, it only deletes the index and doesn't even bother to touch the data. It just indexes every space on the hard-disk as free.


I think what rick means is a low level format. But such a format would take probably days, nobody does this anymore.
Since every a normal disk does always deletes the space before it starts writing this is more economical just to delete the index table.

[Lefty]

Thanks for the replies. here's exactly what I did. On my old hard drive system, I had the two WD Black 2 TB drives.. One used as the Primary drive with Win 8.1, the other as a additional storage drive. I also have three USB Portable drives 1 TB each, which I normally use for backups, and to copy things I want to take to another computer (like installing games on a friends PC etc..). For Christmas, I got a new Samsung 850 SSD drive. Since I wanted to make the existing hard drives run in a RAID 0 (to double the speed), and install the new SSD for my OS, I first copied everything I wanted to keep to the three portables  After I did that, I installed the new SSD and set up Win 8.1. Then I reconfigured the WD's to run in a RAID 0, which necessitates reformatting as well... Then I started copying everything back. I don't know how I missed an entire folder like that... but I did. After I finished, I formatted the drives using the Windows format option. I did just a quick format, not a full one. I did that because it was faster to empty the drives and get them back ready for regular use, than to send that much to the recycle bin.
I did not even realize my mistake until my roommates daughter came over and I wanted her to hear the new Pentatonix Christmas album. When I went to play it, the Music folder was totally empty.

I had not used the portables since it happened, thankfully. I've spent the day running two different recovery soft-wares that I was told to try. Active Undelete Enterprise Ed. and GetDataBack. Both programs are supposed to be especially good at recovering formatted partitions...
It looks like Active Undelete found a lot of the .mp3's and restored them... And I was wrong on the size of the file folder, WAY wrong. The Music alone was split onto two of the drives and about 1.7TB in all. However, it put all of them in one folder with no album information or sorting. It will take months to manually figure out what song goes in what album... I'm running the other one now... Hopefully it will do a better job.

PS: This isn't my first rodeo with recovering a lost file or two... but it is by far my worst case.

[eXodus]

getdataback is normally very good, but has it problems with restoring the folders.

Depends on the file system (FAT32 or NTFS) if you will be able to retrieve the formatted folder information. FAT32 is bad at this stuff.

But lucky you. You could have forget them to copy them on the external disks in the first step. After a RAID 0 setup there is very little hope to retrieve anything.