This article talks about things you can do to help data recovery after format of the hard disk. It also details some of the problems that can occur which may result in fewer results being found.

Formatting a hard disk/drive does not completely wipe the disk of all your documents so it is possible to use recovery software to find your files once again. In truth, all that happens is that the indexes that reference your data are removed from the file allocation table, but the data clusters still remain on the disk.

The data recovery after format can be done using some straightforward steps. Install data recovery software on a secondary partition. You could choose freeware options (e.g. Smart Recover) to do this. Do not install it in the same drive that was formatted as this could start overwriting the data. Start up the program and select the formatted drive for analysis. The application scans the drive, detects any clusters belonging to files and presents you back a list of documents. Review the list of found documents and copy the ones you need onto a separate drive (i.e. do not use the formatted disk, as this could overwrite files in the middle of the copy-paste process).

None of these recovery software tools will guarantee being able to find your files every single time. In fact, if it is a long time since the drive was formatted then it may well be that new files being stored to disk have already overwritten a large number of your files.

If the formatting tool also included a data cleaning wipe of the drive then it will have repeatedly overwritten your data clusters resulting in even less, and possibly none, of your data being found.

Finally, doing a data recovery after format has occurred can bring back varying results depending on the recovery software you choose to use as each one analyzes data clusters on the disk differently. Some commercial tools will be more capable of piecing together dispersed clusters into full/partial documents.

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