Anybody know of a good data recovery company for a personal PC that won't break the bank?
The drive was removed and placed in a static shield bag immediately after being accidentally reformatted. It was used for data storage on a windows 10 PC and does NOT contain the OS. The drive is less than two years old and properly working. It was reformatted with NTFS using quick format. Model number of the drive is the same as my username.
Try using something like Recuva before throwing money away. https://www.piriform.com/recuva
EDIT: I should add, if you attempt to restore with Recuva, make sure you're moving the files to a different hard drive. If you attempt to restore them on the formatted drive, it may overwrite other data you wish to recover. I'm pretty sure it warns you of this, but I've not used for years.
Use Testdisk, you can use under a live system rescue USB
V How to mount a USB device under Gentoo(System Rescue) V
There is a windows version though, I'd still probably just use the System Rescue USB, I don't think the windows one worked for me on a corrupted partition
If you only did a quick format and didn't write anything too the disk it should be really easy to rescue the data. The format probably only deleted the NTFS header.
I would use dd-rescue, as and extra precaution i would create a .img from the disk and put on a secondary disk just in case you get the the commands mixed up. But its not necessary if the disk is in good condition.
If you're uncomfortable with the command line use a GUI based program (with care) as it should be an easy fix.
I highly recommend Recuva as well. I'm not an expert with Recuva, but it's worked for me on several occasions. However, a quick google search got me this: http://blog.igorware.com/undo-quick-format-of-ntfs-partition/
Personally, I would attempt to recover it yourself, so long as you're careful. If you want to be extremely careful, you could do a bit by bit duplication to an identical drive and try to recover that instead. I've used data recovery companies in the past, and let's just say there wasn't a "won't break the bank" option anywhere I could find.
This reminds me I should look into secondary backup plans.
Good luck, sir. Hopefully your life isn't on the line with this.... IE: You just wiped a drive with the only copies of pictures of your kids through the years, and your wife has given you until noon tomorrow to recover them.
As many others have said, I think you should try it yourself first. I've also had luck with data recovery programs in the past.
Ok, I was wondering how easy it would be to do it myself. I'll work on it over the weekend and give an update on how it goes. And no, nothing was written to the disk after the incident.
Doing the recovery yourself is definitely worth it especially you just formatted the disk. I accidentally formatted a 1TB hard disk (which was actually my boot drive for both Windows and Linux) and managed to get literally everything back using testdisk.