I just did the most moronic thing :(

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Join me in my despair, I am going insane. After staying up for 48 hours to complete two essays for my degree course, I needed to burn the essays onto a cd (so I could print them off on a friends pc). In my haste I didn't read my essays through, finding a couple of mistakes, so I went to burn the cd again. My external firewire drive was plugged in, I was using a cd-rw, I was using Disk Utility. To erase the cd so I could write on it again.



Guess, what I, in my shattered state, did.



Without paying any due attention I erased the external hard drive. 40GB of multimedia files gone. Half of that I don't have backup copies of. The realisation of what just happened was the worst part. Well guess I can look on the bright side, I did get the essays in on time.

\

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    OUCH!



    well, if there was any pirated multimedia on that drive then to you, but still, that's a stinger.



    I lost my HD once, lost my whole MP3 collection, but fortunately it was a legit collection(Save for a couple singles here and there) so I was able to reform it fairly quickly.



    but yikes, that's a bummer.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mattyj

    Join me in my despair, I am going insane. After staying up for 48 hours to complete two essays for my degree course, I needed to burn the essays onto a cd (so I could print them off on a friends pc). In my haste I didn't read my essays through, finding a couple of mistakes, so I went to burn the cd again. My external firewire drive was plugged in, I was using a cd-rw, I was using Disk Utility. To erase the cd so I could write on it again.



    Guess, what I, in my shattered state, did.



    Without paying any due attention I erased the external hard drive. 40GB of multimedia files gone. Half of that I don't have backup copies of. The realisation of what just happened was the worst part. Well guess I can look on the bright side, I did get the essays in on time.

    \








    Could you take it to one of those companies that does data recovery?



    Dave.
  • Reply 3 of 9
    Yeah, if you didn't "zero all data" then the files are still there-- it's just the directory that's overwritten. So long as you haven't written anything else to the drive since this event, the files should be easily recoverable (by people that now how, that is, & I'm not one of them)
  • Reply 5 of 9
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    Try MJM or BTinternet (or something).

    I've used mjm and they recovered the contents of a 60GB drive from a 15"powerbook that a Sales guy formatted while trying to run repair disk from a panther cd. I think it cost about 400 quid.



    Dobby.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    applenutapplenut Posts: 5,768member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by chris v

    Yeah, if you didn't "zero all data" then the files are still there-- it's just the directory that's overwritten. So long as you haven't written anything else to the drive since this event, the files should be easily recoverable (by people that now how, that is, & I'm not one of them)



    Norton Utilities used to be able to do this fairly well. Can it not do that anymore?



    I remember using it on my Performa and recovedered most of the stuff easily.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    Earlier this year, I accidentally erased an important folder. I spent $89.00 to get data rescue, http://www.prosofteng.com/products/d...4a839fad658f4.



    This software was expensive but it recovered everything except two files. Presumably, I must have overwritten those two files while browsing the internet for recovery software and downloading it.



    The price is high but it gets the job done. How valuable are those files to you? You will also need another drive where you can save the recovered files. Also allocate plenty of time because Data Recovery will recover all the files in your drive, even the files that you deleted years ago. I had to sort through thousands of files just to locate the 20 or 30 that I was looking for.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    mattyjmattyj Posts: 898member
    Well I'm a student but I purchased Data Recovery X, as I lost 53GB of files. I'm running it at the moment, it's a brand new LaCie 320GB extreme external, and the files on it are kept there, basically I never delete anything off it once it's on there. So every file that was deleted I want back...



    So it's running now, should be done in about half an hour. If you think that software is expensive, try using BinaryBiz VirtualLab, which works on a system of a price per GB, so my 53GB would cost me $359 to recover!
  • Reply 9 of 9
    dude. . .amateur.



    You know you need to go to bed when your vision starts crapping out briefly from time to time. That usually happens around ~65hrs, and it's really fucking scarry the first few times. With that said, I have never hit the three-day mark. My longest run is just shy of 70hrs, when I broke into my prof's office to turn in a big project several hours after the deadline (~1am), and then woke up around 5PM the next day on a couch in a social club on campus that I didn't belong to.



    I don't think I ever formatted my drive, though.
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