Accidentally formatted my hard drive this morning while trying to reinstall windows.

Installed all drivers off the CDs that came with my computer and everything seems to be fine except I HAVE NO GAMES, PORN OR ANIME!

My collection is ruined, ruined I tell you!!

That's not to mention my thesis for my major and my research essay for my History of Nature class.

System restore has nothing and I am bored out of my mind with nothing to do except spam the internet (Sick and Perverse don't fail me now). But a positive is that with a clean slate of a comp I now have the joy of filling up 250 gigs of hard drive space with random crap again :awesome.

[Edit] I know where this goes now, PC and Gaming discussion if an admin wouldn't mind either moving it for me or telling me how to delete this.

 

Huh, awesome. Nice job, hope you remember your essays.

 

Yeah, losing an essay is always painfull.

 

Grab GetDataBack to see if you can recover anything...if your data is important and you think it is worth it then to recover everything you will need to buy it. But the free trial will show if you can recover anything.

Two things for future reference....

1. Backups are not optional!

2. If you accidentally format a drive, don't install anything. It is easier to fix before anything else happens to overwrite the data. Formatting doesn't actually erase anything...it marks the space as 'available' (the same with 'normal' deletion).

 

I'm feeling sympathy pains, and at least I never lost any *important* reports or research when I pulled that kind of screwup.

 

*Stands up straight*

The point Oz is that I HAVE NO PORN! That is all.

[Edit] Mic I wish I knew that before, as it is I've reinstalled windows trying databack now.

 

Dear God.

Go to the gym; talk to a girl - in real life; be less of a nerd.

 

Ugg...

A year or two back, I lost everything that had everything to do with my Final (read term paper) for English class... All I was left with was a crumble up ruff draft that had coffee stains all over it. Had to re-write that fucker from memory in less then two days. Did get a "B" on it...

Now I have multiple email accounts, two external hard drives, a piece of my schools network drive and three internal hard drives.

 

How the hell do you accidentally format your hard drive...? It tells you, at least twice, that it will format and you will lose all your data.

I don't feel the least bit sorry for you. Read instructions moar.

 

This kind of thing has to happen to almost everyone before they learn the power of redundancy and backups.

I mean I keep a smattering of the good bits on my two desktops, laptop, and netbook. Then there's the main 500GB NAS I let anyone schlep from. And my secret backup 1TB NAS that only I have access to. Plus a 500GB USB drive I backup to every couple of months.

Losing 300-400GBs of mp3s and porn would be like a family member dying. I've put years of work into those collections.

Come to think of it, maybe I should get one of those fireproof/waterproof safes for the USB drive.

 

I am so jealous right now.

 

Solid state is the way to go. I've got four small racks of jewel cases, two DVDs to the case. Number each of the cases and have a spreadsheet of what's what tucked away and you're golden.

You've got an umpteen-jiggabyte hard drive taking up a tiny fraction of the space? Hard drive failure. It happens and you know it.

 

Fortunately, I've never lost any data or crashed my hard-drive before. I am, however, quite paranoid about the possibility that I might lose something, so back-ups are a regular for me. But thanks for reminding me, I need to do one again. Even if it's just for my peace of mind.

 

As soon as I move into a new area, I lease a safe-deposit box from the bank. Hard backups go in there several times a year: Tax time, before long trips, whenever there's a major upgrade, and usually once a season, as well.
Even if the computer is stolen or the house burns, we aren't completely destroyed.

 

When it comes to data loss (reformat the wrong partition, hard drive crash, etc), it isn't a matter of 'if' it's a matter of when...so Sophie, you've got a right to be a little paranoid.

 

This, basically.

 

I do everything of importance on paper and I keep paper records of all financial, citizenship-related and educational matters which I photocopy and certify. Then I send the originals home to my parents in Europe who store them all for me.

I never have and probably never will trust computers for those extremely important personal affairs (apart from porn).