Recover data from formatted hard disk

Accidentally formatted the wrong external hard disk. Formatted from Mac Journaled to ExFat. Running a data recovery program on it, it can't find my files back. Can I format it back to Mac Journaled without any big loses, then run data recovery in order to find my data back?

General advice is to do at least as possible with HD to retrieve most data.

Thanks

No, you can not reformat back to HFS+ and expect to recover anything. When you formatted it to exFAT that overwrote the previous format along with all the data that was on the drive. I'm not sure that recovery software would be of any value trying to find your data. What recovery software have you tried? And yes, you're correct about not using the drive for fear of making the situation worse.

Thanks for quick reply. Used Stellar Phoenix Mac data recovery. Local computer shop here asked to much money so tried looking myself first. Any suggestions on what program should be best?

Alas chscag gave you the best answer. And commercial data recovery can cost thousands.