I screwed up.

[Azurik]

I reformatted my girlfriend's hard drive and saved everything except her MS Outlook e-mails. I exported a .PST file, but forgot to transfer it to back-up drive.

Is there ANYTHING I can do now that she already has a fresh copy of the OS on there and everything else deleted?

 

[Taz480]

Not really. You might follow this post.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1771798&enterthread=y
There is expensive data recovery software out there(cant think of them off hand) but they're usually used for things like dead HDDs. Besides, I don't know if it would be worth it for just a few emails. Maybe someone else knows some cheap or near free data recovery software. I appologize if this doesn't really help. But ya, I don't know if I would spend the money or headache for a few emails. That's why I only use web based email, Gmail. Makes things a lot easier if you ever change ISP's, too.

 

[RebateMonger]

The good news is:
Any promises that you made to her via email can now be retracted.

 

[poopyman67]

There is software out there that you can try to get the data back with. You will need to hook her drive into another computer however(you can't use these titles while booting off of the same drive). GOogle data recovery software, and you should find a few things. I did a few years back, but @ the time, I didn't have an extra computer to put the old drive in.

 

[RealTime]

Well without all the expensive stuff...If the drive hasn't written over it then you can recover it. If it has then you would have to send it do a company that specializes in data recovery.

 

[addikt1337]

I looked into that once, and for the little bit of data a friend was asking me to recover would have been a $2500 charge. We're talking about only a few MB of pictures he took.

 

[Parkre]

You shouldn't tell her that you forgot.

But when she asks "where's all my emails?"
reply "oh, i thought I told you to back them up..."

 

[stevty2889]

I used a free program called testdisk once, and managed to recover a partition even after it had been written over. It's worth a try..

 

[Relion]

A team mate did that once with my exboss HD... I was hero of the day when used Easy Recover Pro...

 

[adwilk]

Even using outlook you have to have some kind of server somewhere (hotmail, yahoo, school isp, something... maybe just maybe outlook was setup to leave a copy of messages on the server... worth looking into. I know i set mine up that way just in case...

 

[Navid]

If there is any hope for recovery, you should first stop using the physical drive or at least the partition the pst file was saved to. The more you use the drive (partition) the less likely it becomes that you can get the data back.

There are free trial versions of recovery programs you can download that let you see the files that they can recover. But, to go ahead and recover the files, you will need to buy the software first.

This is an example.

 

[dnuggett]

Pull the drive and run Helix (Linux live) on another computer.