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Mistakenly formatted external big USB drive instead of intented USB drive - can I recover the files?

um flag
Cai

I have this external USB (2TB) disk where I place all my photos and such.

The other day I was making a Unity(!) startup-disk on a separate USB stick but mistakenly put the files on this external disk and didnt notice it before it was done.

Now the question: is there any way for me to get those photos back? At least, the Unity files placed on this external disk was not more than a few Gb, so it should not have overwritten large parts anyway.

I started Gparted and added a partitiontable with hope of restoring the files/photos and then used the Gpart to try to recover. But now Gparted GUI is "Looking for filesystem on /dev/xxx" and the bottom bar is slowly moving.

Should I buy a separate USB HDD where I can place an "image.dd" (it will be 2 TB!) from Testdisk and use Photorec? Or do you have any other suggestion?

Will avatar
id flag
Firstly, I’d *stop* now - it might be recoverable at the moment but that can change if you do the wrong thing. If you don’t have backups - hopefully this is a lesson why you need them - then if that data is precious, take it to a data recovery specialist. If not critical / invaluable, then I’d clone it to another (huge) drive and work on the clone using testdisk and photorec.
Cai avatar
um flag
Cai
Thanks for the advice! I did stop. And bought a new - even bigger - external USB-drive and started with testdisk and photorec. It did not work. After about 4Gb data, the image.dd-file stopped, saying "There is no more space on receiveing disk". After hours and hours, I finally realized - it was formatted in FAT32 and as you all kno - there is a limit what it can handle at 4 GB. So I reformated the new drive with EXT4 - and YES! I got 99% of files back! PS: First thing after all the work, I made a backup. And I will always do. From now ´til eternity!
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