Data Recovery

Data recovery of formatted data is achievable using freely available software applications. In this post I’ll go through some of the tools to use some of the major problems you may experience that reduce the success rate of these programs.

Formatting a hard disk is really only ever done to resolve severe operating system issues or try to improve slow startup or computer performance. Problems arise afterward if you discover that you need to retrieve data that has now been formatted.

Luckily, there is a wide range of free applications (e.g. Recuva, Photo Rec) that can analyze the data clusters in your disk and see if any documents can be retrieved. One key thing about these programs is that you should not install them onto the formatted hard drive as this could result in your original documents being overwritten by the installation files.

Start up your data recovery application of choice and select the formatted disk for scanning. Many programs will allow you to customize/filter the results based on different parameters (e.g. file types, age of file, etc.). This can be worth using especially on larger hard drives where the scan could take 20 or 30 min. to complete.

When the scan results come back, review the files and/or copy them onto a new disk/location.

Some of the problems you may encounter could be due to ongoing usage of the PC. Storing files and formatted disk or running applications result in your original data clusters being overwritten at new data. In due course, all your original files will gradually be overwritten.

Also, if you run a disk defragmentation utility or bad sector repair tool then this could have moved data clusters around the disk sectors making file recovery all the more difficult for most applications. As a result, it is a good idea to try out a couple of different freeware recovery tools to see which finds the most files.