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Accidentally quick formatted Macintosh HD

SDAVE

SDAVE

macrumors 601
Original poster
First I must say that I'm an idiot.

Now that I got that out of the way, I have accidentally formatted my os drive with all my data. How you may ask?

I booted off the snow leopard disk to repair my drive and just formatted it (it's 3 am and I haven't had sleep. Completely my faul.)

I have not written or formatted the drive or touched it. Can I recover all or it?


Thank you
 
Data Rescue 23 could help. In order to use it properly you need to clone your hard drive to an external and then use the programme on the external to scan the internal drive.
 
stridemat said:
Data Rescue 23 could help. In order to use it properly you need to clone your hard drive to an external and then use the programme on the external to scan the internal drive.
Click to expand...

I don't think you will get very far cloning a blank freshly formatted drive to the external drive. Won't it be better to install OS X on the external drive and boot off that?
 
Dumb question but you do have a backup don't you?

I mean with beginning with osx 10.5, you have an easy to use backup utility (time machine) and you should be using that.

If you just reformatted the disk, don't use it at all, the more you use it the less likely you'll recover anything from it. Other then data rescue, you may need to get one of those professional recovery services which can be a bit pricey but they generally work well for the most part.
 
OllyW said:
I don't think you will get very far cloning a blank freshly formatted drive to the external drive. Won't it be better to install OS X on the external drive and boot off that?
Click to expand...

This is not true, I once had a drive go bonkers and I quickly imaged it and tossed the other drive aside. I ran DataRescue on it and was able to recover a lot of stuff. So yes, you can get very far and it should at least be attempted instead of working directly on the drive.
 
Thank you everyone for your replies, really appreciate it. Everything was going terrible for me because I have a huge project due on friday and all my files were on this laptop.

I back up once a month (bad, I know. Just learned my lesson!!)

So I did some research for about 30 mins late at 4am and heard good things about Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery software. I've had used Data Rescue before but that app just removes the folder structures and just gives me categorized files. I needed the folder structure.

So I bought the Stellar app, and it was a huge success! I recovered ALL the data, 235GB worth!

Good news is I have a total image of my OS drive from a month+ ago so I'll use that to restore it so I don't have to reinstall all my apps, etc. The best news is I have all my project files!

Just a quick question, which I'm pretty sure has been answered before...should I use carbon copy cloner for daily backups (incremental) or just use time machine? Not sure what the latter saves, does it save the OS files too as well as anything that has changed? I use a lot of files that are non standard (like after effect projects, etc). I always thought Time Machine just saves QuickTime files, mp3 files, etc.
 
I use Dropbox to backup all my important files.
Curiously, the most important files for me are the smallest ones.
University projects and documents, noted classes, documents that teachers distribute and some other small files.

The rest of the files aren't so important to me (pics, videos, applications that I can re-download, some few mp3 files etc.). I always make a back up of them in my external Samsung S2 HD.
I could be using that HD for Time Machine backup, but I don't think that I need to.

If I need to reinstall the system, all my really important files are safe in my Dropbox account.
 
SDAVE said:
Just a quick question, ...should I use carbon copy cloner for daily backups (incremental) or just use time machine? Not sure what the latter saves, does it save the OS files too as well as anything that has changed? I use a lot of files that are non standard (like after effect projects, etc). I always thought Time Machine just saves QuickTime files, mp3 files, etc.
Click to expand...
TM backs up everything, including system files, the main diference between TM and a CCC backup disk is you cannot boot from the TM disk. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the Install DVD. Either should work to protect your data, but personally I prefer a cloned drive, frequently updated. I have, however, found small errors on my backup disks, Disk Warrior always pops up some red ink after a clone operation, nothing major and it fixes everything, but I thought you should know that so you can run DW or at least Disk utility on your backup disk occassionally.
 
Re:

SDAVE said:
Thank you everyone for your replies, really appreciate it. Everything was going terrible for me because I have a huge project due on friday and all my files were on this laptop.

I back up once a month (bad, I know. Just learned my lesson!!)

So I did some research for about 30 mins late at 4am and heard good things about Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery software. I've had used Data Rescue before but that app just removes the folder structures and just gives me categorized files. I needed the folder structure.

So I bought the Stellar app, and it was a huge success! I recovered ALL the data, 235GB worth!

Good news is I have a total image of my OS drive from a month+ ago so I'll use that to restore it so I don't have to reinstall all my apps, etc. The best news is I have all my project files!

Just a quick question, which I'm pretty sure has been answered before...should I use carbon copy cloner for daily backups (incremental) or just use time machine? Not sure what the latter saves, does it save the OS files too as well as anything that has changed? I use a lot of files that are non standard (like after effect projects, etc). I always thought Time Machine just saves QuickTime files, mp3 files, etc.
Click to expand...

Great SDAVE...Stellar Phoenix Mac is awesome..
 
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