I knew exactly photorec is going to work. Once it literally saved my ass:
I formatted the wrong SD card, thus lost a whole days captured footage of an event.
Do you know that weird bad feeling that starts at the back of your head, goes down to the soles of your feet, then you break out in a cold sweat…
That’s what struck me that I tought I did an irreversibel fatal mistake…
I took that card in safe, and did not use it all, I hoped for something like undelete or unformat or whatever, as it was about a simple exFAT format.
Looking around I found Photorec and indeed, it could recover all my recordings from that card, that was a lifesaver then…
I once did that on a customer’s Netware server. We had to send it to Ontrack to recover a partition. The only bright spot was we found their backup was not working properly. If you want to call that a positive. We did get all their information recovered eventually.
If you plan to throw away a disk and don’t want anyone extracting data from it, buy a cobalt drill bit (very strong) and drill a few holes through the drive.
Dan the man, replied to another question i had asked and suggested bleachbit perhaps that would erase the disk before recycling , will try it next time a disk comes in that i need to erase.
If you have security concerns about recovering deleted files, consider doing a wipe: any SSD should survive doing this occasionally. If you find you need to do this often, consider alternatives such as whole disk encryption.
I have an older external 1 TB HDD storage that is e-sata and I have not tried attaching it yet via that method, but I do need to get the stuff off of it eventually. I did buy one of those external drive enclosures that can read any size drive and attached it via usb to see the contents.
I am sure there are adapters for e-sata to USB A, maybe even C by now. But I would imagine the speed would be affected.
Yes, if you expect an USB3 speed, but connect an USB2 device: you won’t get the speed of USB3 you expect, only the speed of USB2 which the divce supports…
“The theoretical transfer speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbit/s (600MBps) vs. 480 Mbit/s (60MBps) which is a 10X improvement. Sustained transfer speeds (real life) for external hard drives are about 85MBps for USB 3.0 and about 22MBps for USB 2.0, so about a 5X improvement but still a significant advancement in transfer speed.”
It can only do its 4.8Gbps in a burst.
Sata 3 speed of 6Gbps is for continuous transfer
That makes a lot of difference if you are doing something large like a backup, but in terms of responsiveness if you just want one file, they are about the same.
Latest usb3 is quoted at 10Gbps, but it is still a peak speed.
If I get an HDD/SSD from a discarded PC/Laptop , I re-format with Gparted with the drive fitted in an external (very low cost) external drive unit or in a docking station . Following that I re-use the drive from scratch .
I don’t think one can then re-cover files from a previous user…but i am not an IT-expert.
Not easily, but experts can recover erased files.
Reformatting makes it harder, but file remnants can still be on the disk after formatting
That is why people write zero to every byte on the disk. That destroys everything.
I think we have to be sensible… most disks dont contain anything worth recovering.
I do the same, but i read a question on here a few moths back that suggested it was stll possible event after a format or a change to the files system to recover some data. Exclusion was to write 0 or 1 all over the drive, but with ssd not a good idea.
