Well it just wasn’t working at first. After a few tries I finally formatted it and since I was use to just clicking the drive and clicking go in a moment I accidently formatted my external hard drive instead.
Panic struck as realized what I had done and what I potentially had lost. The only good news was I had just put this new 2TB hard drive into service a few weeks ago.
The worst case scenario was I lost images that I had not posted to my cloud servers, which was all the camera RAW files. I just post JPEGs once I finish running them through Lightroom and keep the RAW files in a couple places.
Everything was gone and I hadn’t had a chance to create a backup on some of the files.
I then found Data Rescue 4. I had to run a deep scan and it took a good 24+ hours to scan the 2 TB hard drive. 95%+ of the hard drive was recovered. The only thing is the folder and organization wasn’t as I hoped, but all the RAW files and JPEGs were there.
Couple of points that you need to know to recover the most. First, if you make a similar mistake I made stop and immediately do not use the hard drive until you have recovered your files. Formating is bad, but even worse is shooting more images and writing those to the hard drive.
On the Mac open system preferences and then click on Energy Saver.
Change the Computer Sleep to never when running the program. Put it back when you are done. I made the mistake of not doing this so when I set it to run over night after about 15 minutes the computer stopped running and had gone to sleep.
While I would love to say the moral of the story is to never do this, there are times you too may be so tired and not thinking straight and make a mistake as bad as I just did. There are solutions and this is one that worked for me.
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