How To Recover Data After Formatting Your Computer Hard Drive?

When the operating system formats the hard drive, it will clear the file system on the hard drive and recreate the file system structure. Under Windows operating system, formatting can be divided into two types: Quick Format and Full Format. The Quick Format is the default formatting method of the operating system. It does not completely erase the hard drive data, but only deletes the file system directory, clears the index file, etc. The formatted data still remains on the hard drive, but the system cannot access the data; when the hard drive is fully formatted, the system will clear all data on the hard drive, including the file system, user data, etc., making it difficult to recover data. Therefore, if you just perform the quick format to your computer, and there is not amount of data written to the drive, you have a good change of recovering formatted data.

When performing data recovery after formatting the computer hard drive, you will find that the success rate varies in different situations. Whether the data can be successfully recovered depends on the following factors:

Data overwriting: If the operating system is installed or data is stored immediately after formatting, these write operations are likely to overwrite the original data, resulting in the data being unable to be fully recovered. On the contrary, if no write operations are performed after formatting, the possibility of data recovery will be very high.

Type of lost files: Files such as photos, pictures, and documents are usually easier to recover. Large files such as videos and databases are prone to being stored discontinuously, and are more likely to be damaged again after being lost, making it relatively difficult to recover data.

Health of the hard drive: If the hard drive is physically damaged (such as bad sectors), the difficulty of data recovery will increase, and in severe cases, professional help may be required. For more information on checking your disk health, refer to this guide: Free programs to check hard drive health.

Regarding how to recover data after formatting the computer hard disk, you can refer to the following methods:

(I) Recover data lost due to formatting from backup

Backup is the most straightforward, simple, safe, and reliable data recovery method. If you have backed up the data to other hard disks, cloud storage, or Windows file history before the computer was formatted, you can try to recover lost files via the following steps. If you have not created any backup before, skip this method and perform data recovery following method 2.

Restore data from a USB drive backup: First, connect your external hard drive or USB flash drive that stores your backups to computer, and then open it in Windows File Explorer; next, look for files you want to restore, and copy them back to your computer hard drive.

Restore data from your cloud drives: First, login your cloud drive account, for example, Google Drive. Then you can browse your files that have been uploaded here. Last, download those files you want to restore back to your local drive.

Use the Windows File History function: Open Settings, find "Update & Security", then click "Backup" on the left; click "More Options" on the right, and then find "Restore files from current backup" in the backup options.

(II) Use third-party data recovery software

Professional data recovery software is powerful and supports a variety of file formats and data loss scenarios. It is an important helper for many users when they lose data. Commonly used tools include DiskGenius, CuteRecovery Free, etc.

DiskGenius is highly professional and will perform both quick scan and deep scan when recovering data. Quick scan is used to search for recently deleted files, and deep scan will search sector by sector for data lost due to various reasons; the file recovery function not only supports common file systems under Windows systems such as NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ReFS, but also supports file systems such as EXT4, EXT3, EXT2, etc.; in addition to supporting data recovery from computer hard drives, DiskGenius also supports data recovery from external hard drives, USB flash drives, memory cards, RAID disk arrays, virtual disks, Windows Storage Pools and other devices.

Here are the detailed steps for formatted data recovery using DiskGenius Professional Edition:

Step 1. Open the DiskGenius official website and click "Free Download" to download the DiskGenius free trial version.

Step 2. Run the software and you can see that the software interface is very intuitive. You can see all the disks connecting to the computer in the main interface of the software. Select the formatted drive and click the "File Recovery" button.

Next, click the "Start" button and DiskGenius will immediately start scanning the selected area to search for lost data.

If the area being scanned is quite large or the speed of the hard drive itself is slow, the scanning process may take some time. During the scan, the software will continue to list lost files it finds.

Preview lost files. Use the preview function to view the file content and check whether the file is complete and correct. The file preview function is very important for data such as photos, videos, and documents, because it can help users check in advance whether the file has been damaged.

After previewing files and confirming that there is no problem with lost files, you can export and copy them to a safe location. Note that when specifying the target folder, do not save the data to the source disk to avoid overwriting other unrecovered data.

(III) Create a disk image and recover data

The disk image is to copy the hard disk or other storage device sector by sector to generate an image file that is completely consistent with the original disk structure. The image file contains not only the current data, but also the content that has been lost but not yet overwritten. Therefore, we can try to recover data by scanning the image file, without having to directly operate the original disk.

If the formatted hard disk in the computer has signs of bad sectors, freezing, or frequent disconnections, continued use may cause the situation to deteriorate further and increase the difficulty of data recovery. At this time, we can consider creating an image for the hard disk, and then recover the data from the image file, so that the number of reads and writes to the original hard disk will be reduced to a minimum, and the data recovery process will not be interrupted due to the failure of the original hard disk.

Creating a sector-level image of a hard drive is straightforward, and ordinary users can follow the steps below using DiskGenius:

Friendly reminder: If the source disk has no bad sectors, you can also use the disk cloning function to clone the hard drive to another hard drive by selecting "Copy all sectors". For specific steps, please refer to the tutorial: Cloning Disk.

If the hard drive with lost data has a few bad sectors, the regular disk imaging process might be interrupted due to disk read errors. In this case, it is more appropriate to use the "Copy Sector" feature of DiskGenius. This feature provides a way to deal with bad sectors, such as skipping bad sectors, skipping larger sections of sectors and then try copy them again, reverse copying, etc. For detailed steps with pictures, please refer to the tutorial: Copy Sectors.

(IV) Recovering data via professional data recovery services

If the above methods cannot recover the data lost after formatting, you can consider professional data recovery services, such as manual remote data recovery services. Professional teams have experienced technicians who can recover data from very complex data loss situations. However, if the hard drive has been severely damaged, you will need to send the hard drive to a data recovery technician.

The success rate of data recovery is not always 100%, and every step after data loss may affect the final recovery result. In order to maximize the success rate and reduce losses, the following items are worth paying attention to:

1. Stop using the hard disk immediately to avoid data overwriting. As mentioned earlier, after formatting, the drive is marked as free, and the data actually remains on the disk until it is overwritten. In order to avoid data overwriting as much as possible, we should stop writing operations immediately. If the formatted drive is the computer's system drive, you should avoid reinstalling operating system or running other software, because these operations can easily overwrite the original data. If you need to download hard drive data recovery software, it is recommended to download and install the software on a disk that does not need to recover data, such as a USB flash drive.

2. When downloading data recovery tools, do not download or install software from unknown sources to avoid further damage to data due to malicious programs or viruses. When downloading software, be sure to obtain it from official channels to ensure the security of the software.

3. During the data recovery process, if the hard disk shows signs of physical damage, such as unusually slow scanning speed, frequent disconnections, freezes, etc., please consult a technician in time to find a solution to avoid misoperation that may aggravate data damage.