Accidentally Deleted Files

Call it what you will: a Senior moment, stupidity, finger-trouble, a night-shift hangover... whatever. I managed to not only erase the eternal HDD that had all my photos's (>80,000), but partition the drive as well.

Some severely naughty words were uttered when I realised that, not only had I committed the error on the drive I wanted to stay the way it was but worse, the drive I had intended the process be committed on was the (ex-Windows drive that was to become my backup) from which I had migrated the files only hours before -and then formatted in Windows as an "erase" prior to setting the drive up properly for the Mac!!! So not only was my backup gone, but all my files to boot!!!

Aaaaarrrrggghhhh!!! A disaster of the 1st magnitude!

I was lucky that I'd spent so much time browsing this forum prior to investing in my Mac -wise words and advice from bobtomay, chscag & others sprang to mind. A quick search here, then downloaded the Stellar Recovery software trial version and set it off to do its thing. Around 30 hours later, it had completed the scan of the HDD -and returned slightly more (around 10%) results than I expected! So I very happily and gratefully stumped-up the requested USD$99 and registered the software. Around 6 hours into the recovery now (doing my .NEF files only initially) and all is going very well. I'm fairly confident of a 100% recovery of the lost files -and very very grateful!

+1 rep coming your way soon guys

Absolutely recommend the Stellar Recovery software -it's slow, but it's thorough!

You should have a good chance as long as said drive wasnt written over in the mean time

Good luck with he recovery and let us know how it pans out for you. Might be worth the investment if it is that good at recovery

Cheers

Yeah, as soon as I realised what I'd done, I quarantined both drives. The Windows recovery software didn't do jack -worked for only a few seconds and returned two .txt files, that was it. As I said the Stellar Recovery is slow, but man is it thorough! The .NEF files I've recovered so far (to my Time Capsule) are all browsable in the Finder and I've opened a couple in Pixelmator too to check they're OK -so far, so good. It's going to be a lengthy process to recover all the files/formats -and an even lengthier process to re-sort them all into their proper hierarchical structures -but at least I have the files to be doing that! So yeah, even at this early stage I reckon it's a thoroughly worth-while investment!

What a drag. I haven't made that particular senile moment... "yet". (As I'm looking for some wood and I know it's only a matter of time. I seem to be making plenty of others here lately.)

Keep us informed. While we're always getting folks come and ask what to do, none of them ever come back with any results. It'd be nice to see some actual feedback on how well Stellar Recovery does in this scenario.

Good luck... be hoping for the best.

Well, I'm thrilled to be able to tell you it has just completed stage 1 of the process and recovered >11,000 .NEF files! At least that's most of my RAW data back! Just about to start processing the DNG's, then tomorrow sometime will be doing the TIFF's, JPG's, PNG's et al. Looking REALLY good so-far

Good thing it was an eternal drive!

toMACsh said:

Good thing it was an eternal drive!

Click to expand...

Lasts forever.

I'm a believer in the Phoenix Stellar recovery software also. I accidentally erased a CD RW disk with all our business photos on it. (Not a senile moment, it was a stupid moment!) and the Stellar software got them all back with nary a flinch. It's well worth the price. At least in my situation it was.

Great value for $99 Stellar Recovery for Mac, but it stinks the PC version is $49 ~ quantities sold I guess.

harryb2448 said:

...it stinks the PC version is $49 ~ quantities sold I guess...

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Yeah, I did note the price disparity too. I wonder if the Windoze ver is as effective??? I reckon you'll be onto it with the volume thing.

Regardless, I'm very happy with the results and in no way begrudge them their USD$99!!! I'd be in a world of hurt just now without the software!