Accidently formatted cctv hard disk

[poolshark]

A guy in our street has a other brand Cctv system and its working fine.There was an incident about a week ago when his brother in law stabbed him with a screwdriver.
But when he tried to back up the video to an external Usb memory stick he formatted the hard disk instead..
Any suggestions on which software could possibly recover the files?

 

[Dan]

Hi @poolshark

If the HDD has been formatted using the recorders own software then it will have been wiped clean and it is unlikely any software will be able to recover that footage. If your recorder allowed you to stop the format halfway through then you may be able to recover some files by plugging the HDD into 3rd-party HDD reader, but if there are any remaining files they may be corrupted because the process was stopped halfway.

 

[poolshark]

unfortunately he formatted it completely

 

[poolshark]

im currently trying a trial version of "Minitool photo recovery 3.0" it is detecting video files. but i dont know if it will work or not..it is gonna take 24 hours for first analysis

 

[gp116126]

Plug the drive into a Windows pc. There are plenty of software options to try and recover data from formatted drives as usually formatting doesnt overwrite the data it just identifies the space can be overwritten. It does however depend on the type of files being recovered as to which software is best. Free options are okay to see if data can be recovered but then want a fee to recover files. The best free option that doesn't need a fee is Recuvu Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! Good luck.

 

[poolshark]

Plug the drive into a Windows pc. There are plenty of software options to try and recover data from formatted drives as usually formatting doesnt overwrite the data it just identifies the space can be overwritten. It does however depend on the type of files being recovered as to which software is best. Free options are okay to see if data can be recovered but then want a fee to recover files. The best free option that doesn't need a fee is Recuvu Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! Good luck.

Thanks for reply. unfortunately Recuva doesnt see the drive when plugged into windows pc. i was able to get an older copy of minitools data recovery which took over 24 hours to run.i have recovered files but they are unplayable

 

[gp116126]

Interesting. Is Windows seeing the drive.

 

[poolshark]

no windows wont see it as it is not set up as a windows file system. id have to format it within windows for it to be seen..i have paid for EaseUS Data Recovery software..but again it is going to take 18 hours to scan the 2tb hard disk..it has already found 267 .swf files. but internet explorer is not playing the files ive recovered. I don't want to do too much as its going to take another few hours to complete the scan