Data Recovery After Time Machine Restore

[thedannydavis]

Hey Guys! I'm new to the forum, and couldn't find anything to help me in any of the threads, so whatever help you can give would be great. I recently went to backup some files on an external hard drive I have. By complete accident, I restored the wrong Time Machine backup on my iMac's hard drive. I can now not find the original backup I had for the iMac, so now my iMac is basically a clone of my Macbook Pro. Is there any way to reverse the restore, or to recover some of the files (i.e. music, photos, artwork, etc) from the hard drive? Thank you ahead of time for any help on the subject. Also- I'm running OSX 10.8.2 and Disk Utility won't open... thoughts?

 

[chscag]

If you can't find the original Time Machine backup of your iMac, I'm afraid you're out of luck as there is no way to reverse what you did. Essentially, when you restored an incorrect backup, you overwrote what was on the iMac's hard drive. There is no recovering from that without spending a great deal of money and even then there is no guaranty of recovering your original data.

To get your iMac back to working condition, boot the machine to recovery (command + r after you hear the startup sound), erase the drive with Disk Utility, and reinstall Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store. (Internet Recovery)

 

[thedannydavis]

Thanks for the response. I don't want to do a clean reset of the OS, so if what I have is a clone of my MBP, so be it. I get that I can't undo the Time Machine restore, but I didn't know if there was any way to get any of the files back. I know that when the hard drive erases, it doesn't always get rid of a lot of the data. I was jus wondering if there was some data recovery option (Mac or 3rd Party) that could help me out to at least get some of my media back.

 

[chscag]

I was jus wondering if there was some data recovery option (Mac or 3rd Party) that could help me out to at least get some of my media back.

Normally, there would be. However, you overwrote the data with a backup from your MBP. Once you overwrite data, it takes a great deal of forensic effort and many $$ to recover the underlying data.

 

[thedannydavis]

So a program like WonderShare, or others like it, couldn't find the data even though they advertise to be able to recover data from reformatted and recovered hard drives? To be honest, $80 is not really too much money to spend on software that could help me get pics of my kids and my band's music back.

 

[chscag]

I suppose anything is worth a try at this stage. However, check to see if they offer a trial version before spewing out $80. Most data recovery software providers have a trial version that can be download which you can use to see if it can in fact recover anything.

 

[thedannydavis]

Thanks so much for your input.