…and just realised I left my Lightroom catalogue file on there. Arse. Anyhow, is there any way to get it back? It was a quick format, so presumably the file is still there somewhere – I tried a few file recovery things but they couldn’t find anything on that drive.

Thanks 😉

Just get it off your backup.

Nope. Think they are gone … I think.

😯

1. Power off the hard drive.
2. Plenty of freeware should recover the data.

Did I mention powering off the drive ASAP?

I’ve had success with MiniTool Partition Wizard. Friend had a hard drive which couldn’t keep it’s allocation table after power up. Cloned the drive to a larger one(to save it trying to rewrite over bits) and successfully picked the bits out without too much drama.

I’ve used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk to recover some files on a damged hard drive. I don’t know if it will help you but would be worth a read.

As said there are plenty of tools out there to recover stuff. I take it by format you mean a simple high level “wipe the data references”?

So long as that’s the case a basic data recovery tool will get it all back, more so if you haven’t overwritten anything.

I used this stuff to recover some stuff I had transferred onto a hard drive that promptly failed beyond recovery. Unfortunately the original disk had been written to so I still lost a load but there are further methods to use if you really need to (and can be bothered).

It’s just a matter of how much £££ you’re prepared to spend.

Cheers, I’ll have a go at those things – it’s only the LR catalog not the actual images, so not really worth spending lots on solving 😉

The most important thing until you have explored a few recovery options is to not use the hard drive AT ALL to minimise the amount of old data that is overwritten.

When you format a hard drive it does not really delete all the old files but the sectors which tell the operating system what files are where. The data (unless you used some form of secure erasing software) will be kicking around still until something new gets plopped on top of it.

Shouldn’t cost a thing.

EDIT: BALLS! Meant to post a link to what I was talking about…

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step