Accidental Back-up Drive format

[GamingDude]

Hello, my name is Zachariah Hoel.

 

I'm currently in a very stressful situation. I recently backed up all of my irrecoverable data in a internal HDD just before I wipe everything from my other drives, and install a clean version of windows. During the process, I accidentally clicked "Delete" or something like that to my back-up drive on the windows 10 OS installer. After realizing what I did, I immediately shut down my computer, and plugged out the drive. It was very stupid of me to leave my Back-up drive plugged in while doing this, but now I'm desperate. Since then, I have applied a file format (NTFS) In attempt to recover my data, I've tried MiniTool Power Data Recovery, but I'm at a loss now. I had this drive Bitlocker encrypted. I have the codes, that's not the problem. How do I enter them in, is the real question.

How do I unencrypt the drive, and pull the files out of it via MiniTool Power Data Recovery?

 

Best regards,

Zachariah Hoel

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much do you care about the data? If its very important send it to a data recovery service, they will be much better than you at this.

 

Otherwise, make a image first, this keeps you from screwing up the only copy.

 

Then try programs like testdisk on the image and see if you can get it to recreate a new partition table and fix it.

[Shiv78]

16 minutes ago, GamingDude said:

Since then, I have applied a file format (NTFS) In attempt to recover my data

Wait, why would formatting the drive help you recover data?

[GamingDude]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much do you care about the data? If its very important send it to a data recovery service, they will be much better than you at this.

 

Otherwise, make a image first, this keeps you from screwing up the only copy.

 

Then try programs like testdisk on the image and see if you can get it to recreate a new partition table and fix it.

I care very deeply about this data. It has Photos from my phone from well over 4 years ago to the present.

Do you mind going through the steps on how to make an image?

[GamingDude]

1 minute ago, Shiv78 said:

Wait, why would formatting the drive help you recover data?

A lot of recovery tools I've been trying to use require a drive letter and for the drive to be visible. I read that simply adding a format will not hurt the data. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, GamingDude said:

I care very deeply about this data. It has Photos from my phone from well over 4 years ago to the present.

Do you mind going through the steps on how to make an image?

If you care about it a lot, send it to a recovery service, they can do much better than you can.

 

1 minute ago, GamingDude said:

A lot of recovery tools I've been trying to use require a drive letter and for the drive to be visible. I read that simply adding a format will not hurt the data. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That will just make it worse, your putting a empty file system on the drive, you probably just wrote over some of your data that was there. If you screwup like this again don't touch the drive.

[GamingDude]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you care about it a lot, send it to a recovery service, they can do much better than you can.

 

That will just make it worse, your putting a empty file system on the drive, you probably just wrote over some of your data that was there. If you screwup like this again don't touch the drive.

Understood.

[GamingDude]

Quick Question: Since the drive was bitlocker encrypted, what exactly will they even be able to recover?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, GamingDude said:

Quick Question: Since the drive was bitlocker encrypted, what exactly will they even be able to recover?

 

That just made it a lot worse.

 

You really want to give it to a service and give them the password to the drive. Since its encrypted the normal tools won't work here.

[Arika]

well this is just a comedy of errors that keeps getting better.

[GamingDude]

30 minutes ago, Arika S said:

well this is just a comedy of errors that keeps getting better.

Well, sometimes I learn things the hard way...

[Speed Weed]

First of all, why do you use an internal drive as a backup? That is a bad backup practice right there. You should use an external drive for backup instead. 

[GamingDude]

Just now, Speed Weed said:

First of all, why do you use an internal drive as a backup? That is a bad backup practice right there. You should use an external drive for backup instead. 

I used what was readily available.

 

After this incident, I'll be sure to get a proper, external Back-up drive.

[Speed Weed]

2 minutes ago, GamingDude said:

I used what was readily available.

  

After this incident, I'll be sure to get a proper, external Back-up drive.

I also recommend Aomei FreeBackupper or Macrium Reflect Free as a free backup solution. 

[GamingDude]

16 minutes ago, Speed Weed said:

I also recommend Aomei FreeBackupper or Macrium Reflect Free as a free backup solution. 

Holy crap, I found my photos on Apple's iCloud service 18 hours before they were getting wiped. Downloading them all now, and I'm off to buy a proper back-up as we speak.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

7 hours ago, Speed Weed said:

First of all, why do you use an internal drive as a backup? That is a bad backup practice right there. You should use an external drive for backup instead. 

I agree in that I got the impression he used a drive installed in the computer for his backup. Backup drives should never be installed in the computer.

 

However, better quality internal type bare drives are usually better quality external drives (most external drive manufacturers try to justify the lower quality drives in their external backup drives by claiming external drives don't need to be better since they aren't used as much). I prefer using internal type bare drives for backup drives because I can get better quality drives that way (the drives can be used in an external enclosure, a dock, used with a USB to SATA cable if the drives are 2.5", or poked into a trayless hot swap bay installed in the computer; I favor the latter two). When using multiple, bare drives for backups, you don't waste money and storage space for multiple enclosures and, in the case of 3.5" HDDs, PSUs.

6 hours ago, GamingDude said:

Holy crap, I found my photos on Apple's iCloud service 18 hours before they were getting wiped. Downloading them all now, and I'm off to buy a proper back-up as we speak.

Great! I'm glad you lucked out since losing treasured photos or vital data can be tragic.

 

I'm glad you realize the importance of backups now (it's amazing how many people don't until they lose or nearly lose their data) and are taking steps to get your data backed up. However, I suggest you have more than one backup of your data. First, even back up drives can fail. Second, if you were to ever make another mistake (we have all done it) or one backup drive failed (I've had it happen), you would have another backup to fall back on. I generally recommend that people have two backup drives for each data drive in a computer: one kept onsite and one kept offsite and the two get swapped out as often as practical to ensure both are as up to date as possible.

 

I'm really paranoid in that I have a set of four backup drives for each data drive in my desktop computer since my data is either irreplaceable or would be very expensive to replace. The drives are bare internal type drives I plug into a bulit in hot swap bay in the computer (the machine I'm building has four of them so I can update up to four backup drives at once). I keep two of each set in a drawer at home and the other two in my safe deposit box at my credit union. I swap them out no less than once a month. This is rather extreme (not to mention expensive) for most people and just two backup drives per data drive would be plenty for most people.

[Speed Weed]

1 hour ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I agree in that I got the impression he used a drive installed in the computer for his backup. Backup drives should never be installed in the computer.

  

However, better quality internal type bare drives are usually better quality external drives (most external drive manufacturers try to justify the lower quality drives in their external backup drives by claiming external drives don't need to be better since they aren't used as much). I prefer using internal type bare drives for backup drives because I can get better quality drives that way (the drives can be used in an external enclosure, a dock, used with a USB to SATA cable if the drives are 2.5", or poked into a trayless hot swap bay installed in the computer; I favor the latter two). When using multiple, bare drives for backups, you don't waste money and storage space for multiple enclosures and, in the case of 3.5" HDDs, PSUs.

But I still use external drives for backup and internal drives for daily use. Right now, we have SSD external backup drive which is more faster than typical standard HDD backup, but it comes at the great cost.