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I just accidentally did something catastrophic


Chris...

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3 minutes ago, jsharr said:

Sorry man.  Are they gone forever?  I know very little about hard or drive or reformatting or pictures.  I could have stopped at I know very little.  Hope you can recover the files.

Reformatting alone can be less destructive than reformatting and writing over with new info.  A reformat could be as simple as telling the drive to "forget", but a recovery tool or recover specialist could piece that all back together.

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45 minutes ago, Chris... said:

I reformatted a hard drive that contains a lot of my pictures

Years ago I had software to recover files.  That software has died a long time ago.

Google tells me this will / should work.  https://7datarecovery.com/blog/recover-formatted-hard-drive/

Or you can probably find a computer service somewhere to do this for you. 

If you want to improve your chances of recovering the files do NOT use the hard drive until you can work on recovering the files. 

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14 hours ago, Ralphie said:

I am assuming my current iCloud iPhone backup will cover my phone pics. I should test that though, preferably one at a time. Anyone here familiar with doing that?  Time to google!

Photos and more depending on the settings for what else to back-up - contacts, notes, etc..  

I'm guessing Android is the same, but for an iPhone, if you lost/broke your phone, you get a new one, turn it on, log in, and just let the phone sync the back up.  Easy peasy.

I also have a general rule of thumb in the era of cheap memory & storage, and that is to NEVER EVER format anything other than a brand new out-of-the-box hard drive.  Take the old drive you were going to re-use (and format), unplug it, label it, and toss it in a drawer/box/closet.  Use a new - faster, larger, cheaper - drive and put it in the place of the old one.  Instant "full" backup, and no worries if you did something wrong.

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On 3/20/2023 at 1:26 PM, Chris... said:

I reformatted a hard drive that contains a lot of my pictures

I hope some are backed up!

I messed up yesterday and somehow deleted the "camera" folder on my phone and also the Camera 2022 folder but fortunately had backups of the pictures I keep there in case I want to show them to someone.

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