I am desperately looking for help. Can you please let me know what should I do?
I had a virus on my computer which I couldn’t get rid off. So I formatted my laptop. I lost almost all files, emails, photos and other docs. I tried to restore the data with some paid software for data loss. Unfortunately, none of them helped me.
Can you please let me know if there is an antivirus software that can restore missing files but without any viruses? I have currently Avast but I can’t find any options for this.
You formatted your machine and then reinstalled an OS? Formatted how? Restore function? SSD Secure wipe?
More than likely the data is gone. It will have been overwritten by the new installation of an OS. At least for most files. This is why backups are so important.
If your machine has a traditional HDD instead of an SSD, and had a data partition separate from the OS partition, then maybe recovery software can get most files back. Otherwise things don’t look good. Sorry.
I am not sure what I did, when I installed a recovery software it shows no data to recover. The laptop has SSD.
Do you know if there is a way to recover the data or it is gone for good
The point is that if you formatted and then reinstalled an OS, that means you wrote a lot of new data to the device containing possibly recoverable data. Most likely much of that data is now corrupted or incomplete. The way an SSD works makes things a lot harder because of a thing called wear leveling. Basically the SSD places data in such a way that it maximizes the lifespan of the drive, but in doing so pretty randomly overwrites previous parts.
I’m not familiar with recovery software specifically for SSD’s, but chances are not a lot of data will be recoverable intact. Whatever you do, you shouldn’t use the SSD anymore because continued use will only degrade whatever data remains further. Maybe consider a recovery service if the data is critical.
If by format you mean you secure wiped the drive before a reinstall, then effectively you told the SSD to forget everything that was ever on the drive and zero everything out (or worse: encrypt all existing data and then forget the password, then present the SSD as empty). Again; maybe a recovery service can get something from the drive but it doesn’t look good. Sorry.
Computer technicians using significantly expensive deep recovery software can often recover overwritten data similar to Security agencies (FBI, CIA etc.)
I had similar data loss and much of it was recovered at a significant cost (and time).
That’s what a recovery service does. But they can’t do much if the data was secure wiped. Typically that means that all existing data is encrypted and then all cells in an SSD are zeroed out and set to empty.
Even if no secure wipe was used, on an SSD formatting and reinstall means that random parts of files will be missing. Even on a HDD this is the case, but on an SSD much more so.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have backups.
The data is lost. I contacted installed the recovery software for a deep recovery and didn’t help. I also contacted a few businesses and they didn’t give me any hope…
I decided to buy a new computer as I think the previous one had some issues.
Thank you for your time and the replies, much appreciated!
