Technical FAQ - I have accidentally formatted a partition, can I recover data from it?

Avoid writing data to the accidentally formatted drive or partition.

Successful recovery of formatted drive or partition depends on certain factors:

- File system
- Fragmentation
- Is all data still available (or already overwritten)

When formatting a drive a large portion of the administrative and meta information is re-initialized, but not all of it. Whether recovered data will be intact highly depends on the fragmentation of the file system: since there's no way to tell exactly what clusters 'belonged' to specific files, recovery software will assume that the file system was not fragmented and files were stored in consecutive clusters.

If the partition was reformatted with a different file system, or the same file system uses different parameters (for example different cluster sizes), this will further complicate the recovery. When the program used for the recovery allows it (and Data Recovery Wizard does), specify exactly what file system you 'are looking for', if for example a FAT32 drive was accidentally formatted NTFS, tell the software to 'treat' the partition as if it were a FAT32 drive.

The only way to verify if files can be recovered intact is trying. In general, if the drive was recently defragmented, chances of a good recovery are high. Large files have a higher chance of being fragmented and they are frequently modified.

We advise against the use of tools that attempt 'in place' repairs; that is, tools trying to repair the file system. In general those repair attempts are almost never successful and they can't be undone, which makes data recovery even harder.

Data Recovery Wizard can be used to unformat and recover data from accidentally formatted partitions. please see How to recover formatted logical drives?