Timemachine Question

Time machine reformats the hard drive (not entirely sure though about this, since I have not used OS X Leopard in a while). One thing is for sure though, anything Time machine finds on the hard drive that is not on the computer is automatically deleted. By common knowledge, any file deleted from a hard drive is still there but you need to know your way around the CLI or find a program to recover such data. As I have no knowledge of any such programs or how to recover the data using the terminal, your data is as good as gone. I recommend that you backup your data to multiple mediums, so you don't need to worry about this happening again.

 

How much space do you have on your external at the moment? It's remotely possible that the deleted items are still on the drive but just marked to be overwritten, but TM actually reformats the drive so I doubt it. I'm also not sure if the popular data recovery programs like Disk Warrior II can read other file systems.