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Recovering data from a reformatted SSD

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Hello, all. It's been a nightmare week. My 250GB SSD was running out of space, so some months ago I attached a 500GB external HD for the overflow. But things didn't go very well because a lot of the time the connection with the external HD failed. Besides which, the external drive had my Dropbox folder and, whenever I booted up and there was a connection failure with the external SSD, I'd get a message about the failure of Dropbox. So last week I bought a 480GB SSD (with an enclosure) and, using Acronis 2020, tried to clone the drive, with a view to putting it in place of the 250GB SSD. The first time I tried this, the external HD was not connected. Nothing happened at all. I thought the problem was the missing external HD, so I reconnected it and tried again. This time the program worked, but I got a message warning me about the loss of data. I was immediately concerned that I might be writing my internal SSD, not onto the external SSD in its enclosure, but onto the external HD (despite both drives having the correct letters). So I cancelled the operation and examined the exact number of bytes of both externals. This confirmed that the copying process would be onto the SSD, so I went ahead. I then extracted the internal SSD and replaced it with the new bigger version. The computer failed to boot up. I tried the copying process twice more but again it didn't work. I then tried to update Acronis and discovered that the program itself was corrupt. It took me some eight hours to completely remove all trace of the program, so that I could download a usable version. I reformatted the external SSD and was able to clone my internal SSD without difficulty. After all this, my problem was that I had lost the data on my external HD. I've always been fairly careful about backing up my work but, partly because of looking after an ailing mother and partly because of difficulties with Dropbox, I hadn't realized to what extent lately I HADN'T been backing things up properly. So my question is: is there any chance I can recover the overwritten data? At least, the document names? Many thanks for any suggestions.

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Am I correct in understanding that the problem is with the USB HDD? The first thing to do is not to touch the external HDD until a few things can be established. At all costs you needs to ensure there is no write activity to the USB HDD. Ideally I would create a sector by sector clone of the USB HDD - this will take some time. I am unusual in having 3 or 4 unused USB 3 HDDs lying around - cannot resist a discounted purchase price. The question is: can your finances extend to acquiring a new one.

There are carious utilities that can be used to attempt to recover the lost files. I use UFS Explorer Standard Recovery, which cost me about 40 euros some time back. I can recover from multiple file systems; if you only need to recover from one file system, for example NTFS, xFAT or FAT32 then there are less expensive alternatives available. Whatever program you uses, recover any files to a different HDD.

I cannot make any prediction of the likelihood of success owing to not knowing what exactly happened and the order in which it happened.

Ian

Update: I am a bit confused, for the exposition I got the impression that you wanted to recover data from a USB HDD, but the Topic says SSD. Owing to the different technology used, the ability to recover data may be different for SSD and HDD.

Robert, I agree with Ian that more clarity is needed here to fully understand exactly what data has been overwritten and how / when etc?

From the information given, cloning from your internal SSD to an external SSD should not have had any impact on your external HDD, and also would not include any data from that HDD in the clone operation.

Reformatting the external SSD would only remove the data copied by cloning from the internal SSD, not the HDD.

Any cloning operation should always be preceded by making a full disk backup to another location / external drive, and disconnecting any other drives to avoid user mistakes etc.

To Ian and Steve:

Sorry for the delay in responding to you both. I'm afraid I already did write to the USB HDD because I believed that the overwritten data was totally lost. It was only by chance that I found out there might be a chance of recovery.

Regarding the confusion over SSD and HDD. The original internal drive was a 250GB SSD. The USB HDD (500GB) was the overflow storage drive. The new SSD is 480GB. This is now inside the computer and the USB HDD is again working as an overflow. It contains a complete copy of the original internal SSD plus the few items I have copied across since last weekend. The data that has been lost is the stuff I was storing there. The corrupt version of Acronis somehow reversed both the drive letters of the external drives AND the exact drive sizes. This must sound very improbable to you but I swear that's what happened.

The fact that the USB HDD has been written to at all means that I have unintentionally made things very much worse.  However, I'm willing to give it a go if you think there is still a chance of recovering something. I already do have a separate enclosure and several spare HDDs of various sizes. These have all been used to make backup copies of HDDs on other machines in the past, but I can reformat one of them and try this program UFS Explorer Standard Recovery you mention.

Just how bad did I make things by writing to the USB HDD?

Robert, I wouldn't hold out much hope that you would be able to recover any of the original data that was on the external HDD if this has been overwritten more than once.  This may be possible with the type of forensic tools used by law enforcement but most user tools will not be able to do this unless the actual file data was still present on disk and only the mapping to this has been lost from the Master File Table directory!

I personally have had mixed success with using data recovery tools even in situations where little or no overwriting has been done and the only real guaranteed method has been to have good backups of all data to be able to recover from.

Thank you for your advice, Steve. I'll think about it. I might just try to recover something to teach myself a lesson in not being such a twit in future. Best wishes to you and Ian.

 

Robert thanks for the additional information. Like Steve I have had limited success with file recovery.

Still no sure how you got into the situation in the first place. One thing you need to be very careful of when using recovery media is that the drive letters are not the ones used when you are using Windows. For this reason I always give partitions unique names (it also helps when making and recovering backups).

Ian