Dara Recovery from a partition

Ever formatter a partition by mistake, and ended up losing all your essential data? Realized that it was pretty stupid not to backup your favorite pictures, data from your seniors project and about a 100 other scenarios.

I came across a similar situation a week back, what was worse that i lost all my pictures about 20 GB. I had no backup of about 10 GB of them... I had formatter a 200 GB partition while playing with the partition manager.

I tried a couple of softwares including Get Data Back, Recover My Files etc. But none of them helped much. They were unable to build the exact directory structure of my partition. What complicated the matters was the fact that the data to be recovered was very huge in size. We're talking about a partition of about 200 GB.

I came across a utility known as PhotoRec, it was easy to use and in less that 8 hours, it was able to recover most of the data. But it renamed all the files and the directory structure was lost. When you're dealing with pictures, its not much of a problem as you can use the properties of a picture to know the creation date etc. Using a script, one can regroup them and place them into the directories accordingly. But this becomes a huge problem when you're dealing with text files.... and alot of them. All the files from my ongoing seniors project were lost - most of them being C files. I was in total chaos until I found out EASEUS Data Recovery Professional, I used this software to recover all the data. What really impressed me was the fact that the directory structure was preserved with cent percent accuracy. I got all my project files back. It has a demo wizard available for free. But the professional one comes at a price. But the price is nothing when your seniors project is at stake.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE DOING DATA RECOVERY:

* The moment you realize that you formatted a partition by mistake, stop writing on that disk. If it is an external partition, DO NOT MOUNT that partition.

* It is always advisable to make an image of the formatted partition so that in case somethings goes wrong while the data recovery process, you can always be assured that you have a backup. Most of the data recovery programs use a read only permission on the partition, but still it is advisable to have a backup to be on the safer side.

And last, Learn from other people's mistakes... always always always backup your essential data...!