Lost Database after System Recovery

[martjuli]

My computer crashed (had a blue screen and wouldn't do anything) and the only thing that I could do was a system recovery. Unfortunately this brought the computer back to factory settings and an important database with all of our patients (2000 of them) was lost. I am trying to find out if there is a way to get it back. Could it still be on the hard drive somewhere. I had an IT guy look on my pc and he agreed that it is lost. Is there a way to find out if it is under the layers somewhere? Any help would be great!

[Jeremy]

Welcome to MSFN.

And you didn't make a backup because?

You can try and use some payware programs under trial mode to see if they can recover the data.

R-Studio (many swear by this)

FinalData (may take a full 24 hours but will be very thorough)

RunTime GetDataBack (Many great things heard about this)

I've used all 3 and they all do an excellent job. Your best bet after reading this post and proceeding immediately to grab a trial of one these programs is to install it on a seperate HDD or partition and stop everything you're doing... anything that would result in a write to the disk. The more times data is overwritten exponentially decreases your chances of recovering the data.

For example, if you download an image and then that area of the disk is overwritten with temp/cache files over the next few days then you likely will not be able to recover it. However, if you were to have an episode of your favorite TV show (say 350 MBs worth) that gets written near the end of the drive, then is deleted but nothing is written to that area of the disk from that point onwards, then you try to recover it after maybe... 5 formats, R-Studio will likely recover the entire file for you.

It's a common misconception that the larger the file is the less likely you'll be able to recover it once it's deleted and for an image you should be able to recover it a month later. It's actually the opposite in most cases depending on how many re-writes are done to that area of the disk.

When I used R-Studio, it recovered Star Trek episodes I had deleted months ago on my storage drive after half a dozen formats. I had almost an entire season recovered before files started showing as being corrupt. I was flabbergasted. That's how you know.

Oh, and for future reference: Make Backups!

[ripken204]

these programs all work great. last year i recovered my dads hdd and i found data from 7 years earlier. its just amazing what we have put on our hdds over the years.

[03GrandAmGT]

What Jeremy says about these programs is right on the money.

R-Studio

FinalData

RunTime GetDataBack

Have used all 3 and they are all great programs. I am partial to R-Studio though. It brought a few files/programs back that the other 2 didn't.

jd