Hey Everyone,
I did a big mistake today I accidentally formatted and mounted an archive folder of storage. Is there any possible way I can recover it? I was trying to grow the size of the disk but I just did a stupid mistake and ended up formatting it.
I clicked on format and mount while doing that. Is there any way I can recover it?
I don’t use GUI, so have no idea what the “format button” is.
I would expect the (MS-DOS) term “format” to mean initialization of filesystem.
On command-line, the mkfs.* tools tend to note/warn that there is already (meta)data, if you try to rerun them on volume.
Initialization of filesystem writes initial metadata on volume. That overwrites something, most likely (most of) current metadata. That is, info about existing files. The data-blocks of the files may have remained untouched, but names and locations have not.
There have existed some tools to attempt recovery of corrupted filesystem (for some filesystems), but I don’t remember them.
The metadata still is on disk I can confirm that I used photorec and I was able to recover 780GB of data but it just lost the naming convention. Most probably I need to figure out a way to sort them. Or I might try to look for tools which can help me with replaying the data.
There are tools that allow you to recover formatted disks, R-Linux is one of them or recoverit but the latter has a cost.