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Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Data Recovery From A Formatted Drive

Last Sunday I formatted one of my partitions mistakenly.(Note to self: You moron. When you login as root, be EXTREMELY CAREFUL.) This is one of the occupational hazards of wanting to be in the bleeding edge of GNU/Linux. I reinstall Linux once in a while since it'll become painfully unusable due to my ripping apart all settings and damaging it to the core. This time it affected a windows partition also due to a silly mistake done by me. Affecting a windows installation is not new. But not this severe.
Fortunately, most, if not all, of the data was recovered using EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard. While searching to find a suitable software I realized that there were no decent reviews about these software. So this post.

Fortunately one of my friends had this software and helped me out. But the file names of some of the files are changed to hashes(#) etc. and the files are sometimes in more than one location(size of the recovered data is nearly 50% more than what I actually had.) Anyways, I'm happy to get them back. I was in very bad mood since it contained my entire collection of pictures, arranged. The last word is the catch. You could get almost all of them, but arranging them is a hell lot of work.

Best thing to do when you want to recover data from a drive? Don't do anything to that drive! Install the recovery software in some other dive. Don't touch that particular drive. The more you write, more the chance that your data is overwritten.

For the one who's wondering: The data is not gone when you delete it. Not even when you format it. They can be recovered back. If you want to really delete sensitive info without a trace, try shredding.

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