Data Recovery: How to Recover Data After Formatting Hard Drive? Easy way to recover data.

 

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I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of people out there that have forgot to back up something and they've gone ahead and formatted their machine like this one here and you want to then go back and recover that data is it possible well it is possible and you need to use the right correct software and I'm going to show you a real easy way to recover data from your hard drive even after formatting it and reinstall in Windows you can see here this machine is completely empty it's got a fresh install of Windows all I've done is installed zone alarm Camtasia to capture the screen here and I've installed the software which is what I'm going to use to recover data now you can see I've got a little partition there which is got my software installed onto it because you never want to install the software onto the drive that you're trying to recover data from this is the software I'm gonna use is called get data back now this is not a sponsored video I'm just gonna go out there and say this is probably the best data recovery software that you can use on the market now it's not free but if you want to recover data properly and recover all the data on that drive then get data back is the best in my opinion software you can use to do that now I've used many different types of software and this is always my go-to one to recover data that is hard to recover I've tried a lot of the other free ones like Roku ver and stuff like that it never recovers the data that I need and this software does it all let's take a look at it it's a very simple graphic user interface as you can see here you got your drive here which is what we're going to recover data on now it's best to try and stop using the computer as soon as possible as soon as you've realized you want to recover data and try to recover that data as soon as you can before you continue using that computer because every time you leave it and use the computer you more chance of the data being overwritten now obviously we're gonna click on the drive here and this would in get some information up and allow us to select the level now you can see there's a one-star level down the bottom there in purple this will do a relatively quick scan here and I'm gonna change that in a second we can see here we got some red tiles here we can click on the drive which is the drive we want to recover you've got tools here setting so you can go into your settings and change this to how you want and basically do whatever you want here to set these settings to how you'd like them so you can see here smart scan is on initial one-star and also we've also got bad sectors auto reach higher skip and so on and you can change these up to how you want to do it ok so it's entirely up to you so obviously if you want to do a long deep scan this will take a lot longer but sometimes it's more it's more successful at recovering data we also have our file systems you can take out the ticks on the ones you don't want or you can leave them all ticked it's entirely up to you and I'm gonna leave them all ticked here you can use a valid MFT only and also you've got miscellaneous inside here as well so it's entirely up to you what you want to set yours up as so you can also allow bad directories and so on in there so I'm going to go ahead and leave this as it is and leave it as level one and click on the large drive which is a terabyte toshiba drive which is NTFS you can see there 908 gigabytes in size now this will do a very quick scan of the drive and this is what we call a quick scan it's not a deep scan and it won't take too long and sometimes this may be enough for you to recover what data you need now if it doesn't work you're gonna need to do a deeper scan of that driver cating see it starting to detect stuff on the drive and I'll show you what it looks like here and this is what's going to happen when you've done your quick scan it doesn't take too long at all and you may find that it hasn't detected all the data that you've lost so you may need to do a deeper scan which will take a considerable amount of time but if it means you're going to get your data back then this will probably be the best method for you now you could use some free software out there that is available on the internet but I'm pretty sure that you're not going to be able to get some of your data back that you've lost or formatted previously those are really sort of free options that are not sort of super technical and get right down into the drive and pull up that data I've tried it many times and it's not been that successful so let's go ahead and do a deeper scan on this drive and try to recover data from this drive which we have actually formatted and reinstalled windows now a lot of the free software will struggle trying to recover data from this source situation so you can see here this is the drive here so we've got a nine hundred and thirty two gigabyte Drive which I'm going to be going ahead and doing we're going to go and take a look at the settings up the top here it's very simple and easy to use it's going to settings and I'm just going to make some changes here so data recovery and I'd take the smart out of this and you can see the smart scan will still be on here so I'm going to turn the smart scan off and do a deeper scan on this drive so you see a scan between one star and four stars when when smart scan is on so I'm just going to turn this off here do probably about let's go ahead and do free and what want to do here is recover deleted files also allow Jupiter cut file names and you can also do some other settings you want to here now you can see here filtering if you want to filter out stuff you can do you can also include file names or file types if you want to is going to do all files basically but if you wanted to add those in you could just add those in down the bottom here and include those and they would be extensions as well for instance you could say for instance dot mp4 whatever is that you're looking for jpg and so on but the the scan all will generally find the files that you need on that drive so it's entirely up to you what you want to do there but I'll maybe add those in in a second so let's go ahead and add a couple in here so just gonna go to the end of these stars here I'm gonna lead the all search or win I'm just gonna add a couple of extra ones in here it's going to do dot mp4 and I'll also do dot MKV I've got to double in this and we just do it in M K V and I'm not sure if I would have to remove the all from there and I'm not sure if I to do the dot mp4 but I'm gonna do that and leave it as it is and see how that works that may be needing to look at the tutorial on their website to find out whether that is correct I'll leave it like that for now so go to the file system here and we can also see the file system that it's going to search for which is just about everything in here NTFS exFAT X ext also we've got fat16 fat32 and so on take out the text to whatever you want I'm gonna leave them all tick there we can also use the other settings here if we want to that's pretty much it for me and what I'm gonna do here is click close go ahead and run the scan on the drive and again it will start to run this again you can see it's searching for files on that filesystem type which is NTFS fat12 fat16 and so on and it will go ahead and do a scan on that drive now it will take a bit of time it does give you an estimated time remaining and you can see that is five hours old which is a fair bit of time okay so I wouldn't advise you to sit here and watch this unless you're into sitting there watching a drive scan sector-by-sector it will take a bit of time so again you can remove ticks from certain file types of file systems hypes like fat12 and fat16 and so on if you want to and just search for NTFS that's entirely up to you that may speed up the process and also searching for a particular file type may also speed up the process as well but again I'm just going to letthis run and walk away and leave it's scanning now also make sure the system if it's a drive if it's always advisable to remove the drive from the computer that you're trying to run a scan on and plug it into a computer and scan it that way that way it's a little bit safer and you can scan that drive that way and then also pull off any data on to the computer that you are using to scan that drive on so this will then go ahead now and finish off you can see it's completed and I'm just gonna let this finish off and there we go so that's now done so now we can select the file system that we want to recover data on and you'll see the different ones here and you can just basically click on the one that you want to try to extract information from so just let it build it's a file table here and we can then have a look once that has been completed it may take a little bit of time to do this bit so be patient and once this is done we should see all the information there we go so now we've got the information here and I can already see that this has been a lot more successful than the previous scan I did which was a quick scan and we can go back here and you can see here's some file information here dates and stuff like 2012 2015-16 and so on and some of this stuff will not be recoverable but some of it is recoverable so what I need to do here is have a little search through here for the files that I'm looking for to recover now this is not for me this is for a friend of mine who actually lost the information and he wanted me to try and recover it for him so I said I'll never go at trying to recover it using this software so what are your options if you've used this piece of software and you can't recover the data and it's not there and you've tried every single level now you can see this is level 4 now software recovery doesn't work for you you will need to go to a data recovery specialist and they will do it in a different way they're not going to be using this method they'll be using much more complex and in-depth ways of recovering data from that drive and it will probably be successful but also pretty expensive so let's go ahead here and take a look I found a folder that I want to try to recover here you can see it's a music folder I'm not going to go right through and show you all this stuff that he wants to recover but you can do a search for typical folder that you're trying to find and it will try to find that information or a video or something like that it will try to recover that data and you can also include files modified between certain dates and times so I'm going to go ahead and show you how to recover data here I'm just going to show you one folder here just to let you see basically how to recover it I don't want to show you all of these data but basically we're going to copy this and you can see here I can copy this to another Drive and it's saying caution never specify a directory on the drive you are going to recover so basically you can't recover it to the drive that you've just scanned basically so you need to locate a source which is not the same Drive that you've just scanned on so I'm going to do this just to a quick USB Drive here just to show you for quickness and I'll do a different drive a little bit later on so I've got a little Drive here which I'm gonna copy this - that's good - normally create a folder with a person's name and date on it and copy the data to that so you know exactly where it's going and of course I'm just going to copy this stuff across now you can also do some images here I'm just gonna do this to show you as well just copy this stuff across now you can copy the whole Drive if you want to the whole in folders with loads of information with gigabytes of stuff but that's gonna take some time so I'm just going to quickly show you how to copy some information across and you can see here that's now done and I've now got the information copied offer this drive onto a drive which I've got here as you can see and it's copied both of these across and that's pretty much it that's basically how you can recover your data even after a format using this piece of software so really powerful piece of software now if this doesn't work out for you then you may need to go and see a data recovery specialist which will use different technologies to clean room and pool pull the drive apart and get the information off it and they will charge you or calmly which will not be cheap again remember the Golden Rule back up back up back up and also it just depends how much you're willing to pay for your data and how valuable your data is worth to you so that's pretty much it that's basically how you can recover data even after you've formatted your drive and that's why it's important to make sure you sanitize your drive before you sell your computer because data can be easily recovered.