So, you have a randomly formatted medium from which you need to recover data. Is it possible to recover data after formatting - you ask with hope. Yes! It is possible. A bit of theory for the inexperienced in the restoration of information by humanities. The fact is that file and directory names are simply pointers to where the files are stored, and with normal formatting, only the headers are cleared. And this is already part of the answer to the question of how to recover data after formatting. In this case, the data itself remains completely intact. This statement applies to FAT32 file systems.(still used on flash memory) and NTFS - the most common modern file systems. In order to remove the necessary photos, documents or audio files with a 90% probability, in no case do you need to record other information on the medium. Data may already be permanently erased by new information. There is a whole category of programs designed to save information. Here are some of them - EasyRecovery, Zar, Testdisk, Photorec, Tiramsu. These are the so-called heuristics. They contain an algorithm for searching for images (jpeg, tiff, gif) and documents (doc, xls, odt), the format of which, as you know, has its own characteristics throughout the hard drive. To restore images, we recommend Photorec (free licensed) and Zar,providing shareware versions of image recovery without any restrictions.
Just run the heuristic program, specify the formatted partition of the hard drive and specify the type of image or document you need. When the program finishes scanning, do not be surprised that the results are huge. Save everything to another medium - a hard disk partition or a memory card.Now we look through the received. Naturally, we find many defective images with distortion, as well as small images of the jpeg format (the peculiarity of the jpeg format is that each file in this format contains a miniature copy of the image). The probability of obtaining the desired image depends on whether the recording was made to the hard disk, and the amount of time that has passed since the time was lost. Let's just say that, most likely, nothing will come of it if the image was lost several months ago and is located on the system partition where you regularly install new software. Based on these results, it will be indirectly seen whether it is possible to recover files after formatting. But the scenario is not ruled out that you will not find the necessary data after formatting. Then the question of how to recover data after formatting will be much more serious.Try combining several programs. Remember that you can never do any harm, since programs only read information, but not write. Some of them have already been listed in this article - Easy Recovery, Recuva, Photorec, PC Inspector File Recovery, R. Saver, Pandora Recovery, Any Found Photo Recovery. It should be noted that these are free utilities.
Perhaps this time you are lucky, and the long-awaited graphic file or document will "prove itself". There is another way - to take the hard drive to a well-known service specializing in data recovery. And this is an excellent choice, because service specialists with many years of experience know best how to recover data after formatting. You should choose a well-known company with extensive experience and numerous reviews of grateful customers, preferably in a branch of a foreign company. As a rule, in such firms there are specialists who use their developments in the field of software and heuristics much more efficiently than public programs. In addition, such a specialist can know many subtleties about the formats and settings of programs that you do not know, and will successfully cope with the task. And here is the data, finally,found. But the cost of data recovery in such companies is quite high. Let this serve as a fee and a kind of lesson for the fact that you did not bother in timebacking up the information you need so much. But if the incident with the loss of critical information has occurred, then do not despair - everything is fixable. You need to carefully read the article "How to recover data after formatting. Brief instructions for non-professionals." Remember a simple rule - in no case do not write information "on top" to this medium. And the last recommendation is to purchase only expensive flash memory. This can serve as at least some, albeit rather ephemeral, guarantee of reliability.