Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

How to recover data from an formatted HFS Drive

Last week my Time Machine Backup Hard disk suddenly died! Everytime I plugged the hard disk, my mac did not recognise the file system (it was a HFS+ partition) and asked my to format it. I did format it, only to realise that I had lost some precious data.

How do you recover data from a formatted hard disk? Enter Data Rescue from PROSoft Engineering. I used Data Rescue II (only to realise afterwards that a new version was available). It took more than 2 days to scan the hard disk (1 TB hard disk, sector by sector analysis) and afterwards it recreated the files it found.

Recreation of the files, was also a lengthy process, and took nearly 10 hrs. After it recovers the files it presents a list of the kinds of files you might be interested in restoring. I selected the files I was interested in, research papers and my iPhoto Collection.

Recovery of the selected files (around 55.6GB) took around 3 hrs.

All in all I'm really grateful for such fantastic software. For all the windows users out there.... My NTFS hard disk has failed as well (bad start to the year! ). Currently I'm using ParetoLogic's Data Recovery Pro. The data recovery process is currently on going (since 5 days).