Storage Solutions Emergency recovery of 9+TB of Data.. Please Advise

max_demon

max_demon

@maxdemon
Adept
Hello, My whole system has been formatted by a mad person including 4 Hard Disks of 3 TB. I had over 9TB of Data on it. I can buy more hard disk if required for the recovery process. Please help me on how to proceed. It has been Right Click Quick Format NTFS. the drives are untouched after that incident and the unneeded drives are unplugged.

I currently do not have license of any software
Which Software should I buy for fastest/best recovery?
What additional Hardware should I purchase?
What should be approximate time in which the Data can be recovered?

Please Help, I'm very confused on how to proceed. I have searched the forum already for similar threads, most of them deal with low volume of data but I want to know how to deal with this situation :(

maybe there are latest offering/version of software which could be more efficient so its better discussed in new thread.
 
try Recuva from another system, with one of your hard disks attached as secondary or as a USB drive (you know the drill). quick formatted disks still have data intact. don't try to use partition/un-formatting tools before recovering your important data.
 
max_demon said:
Hello, My whole system has been formatted by a mad person including 4 Hard Disks of 3 TB. I had over 9TB of Data on it. I can buy more hard disk if required for the recovery process. Please help me on how to proceed. It has been Right Click Quick Format NTFS. the drives are untouched after that incident and the unneeded drives are unplugged.

I currently do not have license of any software
Which Software should I buy for fastest/best recovery?
What additional Hardware should I purchase?
What should be approximate time in which the Data can be recovered?

Please Help, I'm very confused on how to proceed. I have searched the forum already for similar threads, most of them deal with low volume of data but I want to know how to deal with this situation :(

maybe there are latest offering/version of software which could be more efficient so its better discussed in new thread.
Click to expand...

First, keep calm and don't panic.

You have a very good chance of recovery if it's indeed just a quick format in Windows that's taken out your data. You were right to keep the original drives untouched. Keep them that way until you are ready to begin the restore.

You can use Windows tools like Recuva or testdisk, one of several Linux recovery distro's, Hiren's bootcd etc to restore the data. Recuva is straightforward to use, testdisk, the Linux distro's and the utilities on Hiren's bootcd may get a little tricky, especially if you haven't done recovery before. Either way get at least one additional 4TB HDD or access to at least 4TB of NAS storage as a work area for your restored data since you don't want to write to the formatted HDD's until you complete the recovery and have verified the recovered data.

If you want to be absolutely safe while recovering the lost data, image the drives and restore from the images keeping the original untouched until you have recovered the data. This may not apply if your disks were in a RAID. You can use freeware such as OSFClone and OSFMount from http://www.osforensics.com/tools/index.html to clone images and then mount and restore from the images.

It is also possible to hardware write protect your source disks using hardware HDD write blockers. Use this if you need to be absolutely sure that no writes happen to your source disks during the image and restore process. IMO, this is not necessary unless you are doing forensics or you just don't want to take chances and can afford the additional disk storage (see next para). HDD write blockers will also not be cheap and may be hard to get in India.

You will need temporary storage to restore your 4x3TB. At a minimum one additional 3 or 4 TB disk as a temporary storage area to restore your 9TB of data, 3TB disk at a time unless you had a RAID config and data was striped across the drives and then it's a whole 'nother can o' worms. If you are going to image each drive, you will perhaps need as much as the original HDD space available (i.e.) 4x3TB and then additional storage of perhaps 3 or 4TB at least to perform the restores. The storage for image/restores/temp work area can be NAS storage too or a SAN if you have access to one provided the restore software can deal with such storage.

Restoring 9TB of data will take a fair amount of time. At a minimum your weekend is toast. If you encounter other problems during the restore, figure on even more time gone.

If the data is really valuable and you don't want to risk it, consider data recovery services. However commercial data recovery of 9TB will cost you more than a bit.
 
^^ Good post.

In addition, factor in the possibility of restoring only that set of data which is absolutely essential. Though bit-perfect recovery is possible, the large the volume of data and the larger the file size,the more difficult it gets, even with a simple error such as Quick Format.

If some of the data is accessible, for example, in your sent email, or can be downloaded from the internet again, think about doing that. Sometimes if you have been working on a document, the recovery copy may not be the last saved copy. Depending on your recovery, music and movie files may not fully restore correctly. It's going to be a pain anyway you look at it, and in general if your recovery process is likely to take longer than a few hours the safest way is to have a 1:1 copy. However everyone, myself included, have learnt this the hard way.
 
Most of the data on it are just media, can be obtained from other places but still if it can be recovered (after important data) then its good.
A small portion of the data were finished projects and work in progress projects of editing including 300 GB of Photos that I took in my lifetime (this is very critical)
Important data doesn't exceed more than 600GBs. I'll first look to recover these first then proceed on to the other stuffs.

3 of the 3TB drives were external and can be attached to other system as required.

however 1 (2x1) of the disk is configured in RAID 0 along with movies it contain my recorded Videos the configuration of this drive is 1.5TB + 1.5TB.. how to proceed with recovering of this drive. It is currently disconnected and show up in system only if both the drives are connected.

I'm buying WD Green 3TB for temporary recovery Drive.. any good deals for it or place from where to buy online?
 
I have tried recuva to recover deleted files from a ntfs hdd. I purposely formatted, and over wrote with media files and then formatted the disc again. Still with a deep scan it was able to see more than 1500+ emails, etc. This was on a 500GB disc and estimated time was around 5+ hr's for scanning.
The only problem with recuva is the files that it recovers cannot be opened. I tried recovering 100MB zip file and after recovery (exact as original), the file won't open in windows or 7zip and errors out with invalid zip file. Same with images or emails. I suggest you to look at another software that foes its job properly. For your situation I guess you'll be looking at a month's worth of work or more.
 
max_demon said:
however 1 (2x1) of the disk is configured in RAID 0 along with movies it contain my recorded Videos the configuration of this drive is 1.5TB + 1.5TB.. how to proceed with recovering of this drive. It is currently disconnected and show up in system only if both the drives are connected.
Click to expand...

RAID 0 will require all drives to be present for the volume to show up. Attach an external drive and use Recuva to scan the volume and backup whatever you can. Make sure you don't write anything to the drives in the RAID array. Also check your PM.
 
Also any deals for 3/4 TB of Hard disks for this purpose..? I think 4 TB should be good option as it will give some headroom for the recovery process... I am getting back all my photos through Recuva.. (no deep scan) 4 hours left for process to complete.. this counted as Important data. Had some couple of 1TB External Drives which are serving their purpose now.

BTW none of the drives are failing/failed, and health of all the drives are good. any precautions should I take so that they don't fail at least till I recover the data.
 
I had my 1 TB drive go kaput on me a couple of weeks back. Testdisk did not work for me and I am now trying R Studio for the recovery. It's got decent reviews online, youj may give that a shot too.
 
Final Update : I was able to recover most of the Data with Recuva Free Version. I had tried scan using various paid utilities (trial) but they were ineffective. Recuva not only recovered all non corrupt data but it even restored the folder structure with file names as it is.

It did take more time in scanning than those other utilities but final result was satisfying. only lost about 400 GB of 'corrupt' data which was just media so didn't cared much. All important files are safe :)

Thanks to all the members who assisted me in this situation :) very relieved after recovering. Had to be extra careful in future to whom I hand over my desktop access.
 
I love GetDataBack or Testdisk for NTFS - they can just restore the partition records to pre-format if the drive is untouched after quick format. Do try those as well.
 
In the future...

1. Keep a 1:1 backup.

2. Create a 'Limited' account on the PC and log all admin accounts out before giving it over.
 
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