File recovery - stupid me


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So? I used Norton Ghost to restore a Windows partition and somehow (and I will never know how, and have never done this in the 10 years I?ve owned Norton Ghost) I selected the wrong partition and ended up wiping a 800GB of a data storage partition and writing 8GB of a Windows OS partition onto it.

Now I?m not crazy, I do keep backups so the important stuff has not been lost however I have lost some basic stuff that I never got round to backing up and I?ve also lost the last 3 weeks of useful files.

I?ve done lots of reading on partition/folder/file restoration but have yet to find software that?s used and recommended by people I trust. At this point I thought my brothers and sisters at Neowin may be able to offer some recommendations based on what they know works ? not just on what is found on a Google search.

So any recommendations or advice on the subject?

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My friend recently accidentally wiped 1.8TB of data which included the partition.

What i used was PartedMagic on a pendrive and used the PhotoRec app. While it may sound like a photo recovery tool, it recovers a lot more and will recover data regardless of file system used.

It took forever (about a day and a half). It did however recover about 1.2TB of data. Even some really old files.

Might be worth giving that a try.

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My friend recently accidentally wiped 1.8TB of data which included the partition.

What i used was PartedMagic on a pendrive and used the PhotoRec app. While it may sound like a photo recovery tool, it recovers a lot more and will recover data regardless of file system used.

It took forever (about a day and a half). It did however recover about 1.TB of data. Even some really old files.

Might be worth giving that a try.

I done some reading on that a few days back and it does seem quite good, defiantly one for the toolbox over the weekend. Thanks for your reply.

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I used a copy of getdataback all one word, when I erased 50k of my MP3s by accident. 2hrs and I had everything back. I deleted my HD partition by accident.

http://www.runtime.o...ry-software.htm its like $80 but worked great.

I haven't heard of this before but Id be willing to pay the cash just for the convenience. I will have a look, hopefully they give a trial so I can see what they can potentially restore.

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I haven't heard of this before but Id be willing to pay the cash just for the convenience. I will have a look, hopefully they give a trial so I can see what they can potentially restore.

They do have a demo. They have been around for a while. Was 10 years ago when I deleted my MP3s.

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They do have a demo. They have been around for a while. Was 10 years ago when I deleted my MP3s.

Im going to have a look now

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Cool. Let me know how that goes. Have not used it for a while.

I have taken the opportunity and decided to double my storage capacity - The new drive should be delivered by Amazon tomorrow. First task will be to try and restore what i can from the deleted partition on the current/soon to be old drive. Thanks for your reply.

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TestDisk and PhotoRec are my favorite file recovery tools; been using both for some years now and I've been able to rescue whole NTFS partitions or just files with a very high success rate, even when the disks aren't recognized in Windows anymore or just plain failed, as long the rotating servo works.

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TestDisk and PhotoRec are my favorite file recovery tools; been using both for some years now and I've been able to rescue whole NTFS partitions or just files with a very high success rate, even when the disks aren't recognized in Windows anymore or just plain failed, as long the rotating servo works.

Much appreciated

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Also I've always used the Linux version; it can take quite allot of time to recover (because the "hammering" those apps do to the disk), but at least it can recover; the disk is trash anyways so...

glad to help :)

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