Data recovery on stolen (and recovered) MBP

[ninjamoby]

My MBP was stolen many months ago and through some effort on my part and assistance by several police departments, it was recovered by the police and will soon be in my hands.

The laptop was loaded with Lojack - however Lojack never contacted the monitoring center, which leads me to believe the thief immediately formatted and reinstalled OSX.

Fortunately for me, I didn't lose any major data.

Everything was backed up on Time Machine EXCEPT my iPhoto library (around 30 GB of images) - which is what I hope to recover from the formatted drive.

I've heard that data can be recovered from formatted drives, at the expense of the drive itself (which might be destroyed in the recovery process). Does anyone have any info about steps that can be taken - whether software based on sending it off to a data recovery service?

I will inform everyone of the status of the machine once it is back in my hands, and eventually relate the story of its recovery.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Data Rescue or Disk Drill or File Salvage might help.

 

[satcomer]

If the drive was formatted maybe a data recovery program like Data Resuce might be able to get the data off it. One thing though, if the thief has been overwriting the data you had it might have wrote over the part of the drive that held the photo data.

Good Luck.

 

[ninjamoby]

Thanks. I'm running Data Rescue now. Will see what it uncovers after the 5 hour scan.

 

[ninjamoby]

Both the deleted file scan and deep file scan of Data Rescue didn't come up with anything of mine.

Found a lot of WEIRD photos of teeth though.

 

[kainjow]

Not one thing?

I'm betting the drive was zeroed completely at some point, or it's not even the same drive in there...

 

[lighthouse_man]

It's been months as you say that the computer had been stolen, so recovery possibilities are very slim. Just buy an external drive now and start using Time Machine or whatever other data backup program you prefer.