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Kopkiwi

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#123275 1-Jul-2013 23:36
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Wife accidentally formatted her USB Stick before removing all the files, very important files. Is there a way to recover these?

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dontpanic42
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  #847989 1-Jul-2013 23:46
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Wellingtondave
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  #847990 1-Jul-2013 23:47
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Yes in many cases as long as the files have not been overwritten by other data, there are many recovery tools.

Recuva from Piriform has worked for me before, it's free.

qwerty7
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  #847991 1-Jul-2013 23:49
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The more you play with it the less likely you are to get them back. If they are crtically important I assume not, leave it to a pro.
Otherwise try 'recuva' by piriform and hope for the best



Kopkiwi

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  #847992 1-Jul-2013 23:51
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Tried recuva, got nothing.

Might have to take it somewhere. Any suggestions for a place in Chch?

Peppery
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  #848000 2-Jul-2013 00:29
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If you aren't scared of the command line, PhotoRec is very, very good. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

wallop
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  #848057 2-Jul-2013 08:57
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Did you use the deep scan option in recuva?

Kopkiwi

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  #848067 2-Jul-2013 09:05
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Peppery: If you aren't scared of the command line, PhotoRec is very, very good. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec


Thanks will try that tonight.

wallop: Did you use the deep scan option in recuva?


Yep. Got nothing from that either.

 
 
 

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josephhinvest
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  #848073 2-Jul-2013 09:14
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I remember several years ago when a junior co-worker mistakenly re-partitioned a customer hard drive. We were able to recover all the customer's files. (I think we used Data Rescue for mac).
A fairly stressful afternoon!

Cheers,
Joseph

Kopkiwi

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  #848107 2-Jul-2013 09:39
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josephhinvest: I remember several years ago when a junior co-worker mistakenly re-partitioned a customer hard drive. We were able to recover all the customer's files. (I think we used Data Rescue for mac).
A fairly stressful afternoon!

Cheers,
Joseph


Yeah being that our wedding and engagement photos are on this, or were, the wife is a tad upset.

trig42
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  #848114 2-Jul-2013 09:58
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Get Data Back - paid for software, but I have used it successfully in the past on USB sticks, HDDs and SD cards.

Good luck, and if/when you recover them, back them up :).

nova
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  #848138 2-Jul-2013 10:41
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Hopefully she had the "Quick Format" option checked when she did it, otherwise there is not going to be much hope.

If you have linux, one thing worth doing is taking a low level copy of the USB stick, with a command something like this:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/r1 bs=512
Recovering the actual data is still going to be tricky, but this gives you a backup image to work with, and inspecting this image will help determine if there is any point trying to recover the data further. If the data is mostly zeros or compresses down really well then I would give up. If you can see lots of JPEG file markers in it, then it is worth persevering (e.g. the start of image marker is 0xFF, 0xD8)

Recovering the files is going to come down to having the right tools, and I don't have any experience with that, but this might help a little bit.
 

Rickles
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  #848203 2-Jul-2013 12:36
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I've had success using Glary Undelete/Recovery (http://www.glarysoft.com/glary-undelete/) and it's free.

However, deep reformatting writes the F6 character all over the disk/drive/memory so in your case professional recovery attempt is best bet.

R.

gareth41
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  #849424 4-Jul-2013 22:19
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GetDataBack will do it. If the USB stick has a "lock" or "write protect" switch then make sure this is switched on before attempting to recover any data. Provided the stick was removed immediately after formatting and wasn't used in anything else, you should have a very good chance at getting your files back.  Formatting a USB stick is like ripping the contents page out of a book, you don't know where the chapters start.  Its the same with filesystems, the files are still there after formatting but there's no reference to them.

bigal_nz
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  #849462 5-Jul-2013 06:35
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nova: Hopefully she had the "Quick Format" option checked when she did it, otherwise there is not going to be much hope.

If you have linux, one thing worth doing is taking a low level copy of the USB stick, with a command something like this:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/r1 bs=512
Recovering the actual data is still going to be tricky, but this gives you a backup image to work with, and inspecting this image will help determine if there is any point trying to recover the data further. If the data is mostly zeros or compresses down really well then I would give up. If you can see lots of JPEG file markers in it, then it is worth persevering (e.g. the start of image marker is 0xFF, 0xD8)

Recovering the files is going to come down to having the right tools, and I don't have any experience with that, but this might help a little bit.
 


+1 for taking a raw image of the disk and work and that with photorec.

if they are jpg files then even better. Once you have a copy dobt work on the stick...work on the copy.


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