Recovering after Format

[CoolSax]

I lost some pictures after formatting my computer. I've heard of rumors of being able to somehow recover files after format. I've never really believed it, just thought I'd see what everyone else thought.

[Steve R Jones]

If you didn't zero fill the drive and the sooner you stop using it the better your chances...

PC Inspector is a popular "Data Recovery" app.

[CoolSax]

what do you mean zero fill?

[Steve R Jones]

Zero fill is something you do before a format to make sure NO One can get data off the drive.

[CoolSax]

cool, thanks

[sr71000]

when you use windows it just does a high level format (doesn't actually erase the old data, just gets rid of the link to it and pretends it's garbage random data. I low level format (zero fill, 1 fill, 01 fill, random fill...) actually writes over all the old data. So long as you didn't low level format it MAY still be there if it hasn't been overwritten by something else yet. I've had luck with a program called recuvia as well as the one listed in the above posts

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home