Problem With Recovery - Wiped Out Hard Drive
I have an old laptop that I was going to sell but it had some programs on it that I wanted to keep. I looked online for a program that will transfer the programs from one hard drive to another ( I wanted to put them on my external drive)
Acronis came up and I downloaded a trial version of True Image Home 2011. I created a backup of the entire hard drive of the old laptop and put it on my second external hard drive.
I then went to "recover" the backup I made and chose to put it on my original external hard drive. The whole process took about 3 minutes and when it was done, my original hard drive was wiped clean and the only files on it are the ones from the old laptop.
I'm freaking out because that hard drive had my whole life on it. I had no idea it would wipe it clean. Is there anyway of recovering those files? I can't seem to contact Acronis support. They don't seem to have a general email address. Can anyone help? I tried a free data recovery program but it doesn't seem to work. Please help.
Actually, there were NO warnings whatsoever from Acronis. All that I had to choose from was which drive I would use to recover the backup. Nothing EVER warned me that the destination would be wiped out. Obviously if there was a warning, I would not have gone through with it. So, no it did NOT "clearly" warn me about losing all the data.
Second, I have been told by several people that I should be able to recover most of what was supposedly lost. I am still hopeful. Thanks for replying anyways.
It appears that TI 2011 does not provide a warning if the destination drive has data.
This is contrary to previous behaviour - well it was a problem a few versions ago until the warning notice was implemented.
I just backed up a bootable USB memory stick to my C drive as a tib file
When I restored the tib file to another USB memstick -which had data on it- all I got asked for was the destination
There was no warning that I saw that restoring would delete the data on the destination drive.
Joe I assume you did a full drive backup and restore rather than a file backup and restore?
Good luck with any recovery effort
The recovery process should be fail safe. On the penultimate recovery screen it is necessary to select the target for the restoration. The final screen lists which partitions will be deleted. This summary screen is a clear reminder of what is going to deleted and overwritten.
In the case of file recoveries the user is given the choice replacing the existing file or sending the recovered file to a new location.
Tatou has come up with a specific Memory stick example which I have not checked out. If I want to copy one stick to another I would either drag and drop or use the send to process which would not use TI at all. However I guess that many users would place data on a memory stick which has no partitions and not even use a folder wrapper so If they used TI to copy to another stick on drive to drive basis the target drive would indeed be deleted. I still believe that this would show up on the final summary screen.
Having said all that it is plain that some people will miss the existing warnings so perhaps Acronis should give them more emphasis. It is all set out in the manual but I normally don't read manuals either.
why did you recover the file you can browse the tib file by doubleclicking it and go through it all next option would be create a virtual machine with virtualbox and recover it and boot your old windows
but if you have done this now the program i suggest would be easy recovery 6 or latest version to try and recover what hasn't been overwritten by the recovery
or
Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS-Data Recovery Software
good luck