Top pic representing the level of destruction on my data loss.
Well here it goes; today when I was trying to access my shitty WD 1TB external hard drive - the USB connector hasn't been in a good condition lately - something played up. I plugged in the usb cable and found in every way that I had to reformat the drive, despite any attempts to recover everything off there. But I was forced to do so regardless. I though to myself afterwards, yep I should be able to recover something at least after the format. Hours later, absolutely nothing can be recovered. I put in another thought that the drive is suffering from bad sectors but a CHKDSK run found nothing. I'm currently doing another test to see the evidence.
Next time, I should use an external hard drive, as by any means not to be accessed most of the time; I.E, as a mainstream storage medium, but rather as a safe backup. May think of getting more 1TB+ drives as a result and put it in like RAID 1 or 5, depending on whether I get any income or what.
And while I'm at it, who here has any data recovery software in their mind?
On a final note, I'll leave you with another image:
Doesn't formatting a hard drive basically wipe all the data off of it? I really don't see how you would be able to recover any of the data after formatting the hard drive. Unless you're moving data around from one computer to another all the time, your best bet is going to be internal storage. Btw, RAID 1 or RAID 10 should help with data security.
When you delete something off a hard drive, it doesn't 100% get rid of it. Traces of the file can be found by special recovery software, and if all the data for that file is still present, it can re-structure the traces of data back into a file.
Formatting the drive doesn't really ensures that everything is wiped off correctly, especially that I formatted the drive in Windows. If you need something that will make sure every trace is gone, best thing is to find a bootable image of some sort that has a variety of options on which formatting standards you want to choose, depending on your time. I'm not sure if formatting is different than deleting in technical terms; writing zeros over the data to make the PC thinking it detects "free space".
A quick format doesn't wipe any data, it just creates a new MBR and FS. The drive appears to be empty, but you can write new data over old (or recover old data).
Recuva comes to mind for recovery. Stress testing hard drives before actually using them is a good choice as well. In Linux it can be done this way: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/sag47-492023/stress-testing-a-new-hard-drive-28325/
Checking dmesg and syslog for errors after a period of at least 24 hours is recommended.
Even after performing a quick-format, you can still usually recover all of the data (unless it was previously corrupted or the drive is failing) by using recovery tools like Recuva or GetDataBack, etc... Formatting doesn't actually erase any data in the sectors, but simply wipes the index and marks everything as open space so your OS can freely write to the 'empty' disk. The data is still there - it's just being ignored, and the drive marks the space as usable. Unless new data has been rewritten, you can restore the old data.
Try Recuva by Piriform (makers of CCleaner). I've had decent luck with that. It's free and easy to use.
For storage, I use a single 1TB internal drive on my main machine, and a 2TB internal drive on my HTPC. There's a 4TB external drive connected to my HTPC that handles backups. It's pretty simple and there's no RAID involved.
