Accidental format of drive containing tib file

I left my external hard drive connected to my pc while windows reinstalled and the drive was formatted. The external drive contains my Acronis back up file. Is there any way of recovering the TIB file?

Thanks for any help

 

There is some UNFORMAT software around that will liekly be able to undo a quick format, but if the drive was truly reformatted, then the contents are more likely lost. If only one byte, much less an entire sector or cluster of a tib file is wrong, the entire tib is useless.

 

You will have to use a specialized drive recovery program. I've successfully used the one made by RStudio a few times. There may even be free ones available. Try a Google search.

 

I am trying RStudio now the problem with other recovery software has been that they do not "see" the TIB file (It was the only file on the drive) but they appear to "see" some of the contents

R Studio also appears to see the files in the TIB file. I have not tried to resore the files with R Studio as I have not paid for a full working copy.

 

Am I the only person to ever have this problem?

 

Perhaps only the first person to admit it.

 

Perhaps you are right. I wonder if there is a problem with recovery software and very large files It would be good to haer dfrom anyone who has recovered an Aronis back up or any other very large file

Tony

 

you can try the free testdisk, it has tools to recover a reformat. It also has a recovery addon "photorec" maybe that program can see your tib. It shows tib as a supported file that it can recover.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec

 

Thamks Jony I will try it and report back.

 

Test disk did not work.......

 

Were both the old format and the new format NTFS?

Do you know for sure if only a quick format was done on the drive? This type of format would have only taken a few seconds to complete.

Since the TIB file was the only file on the drive, it's important to know if anything was written to the drive after it was reformatted. If so, it's very unlikely that the file can be recovered intact. Even if only several bytes were written over the start of the TIB file, it's most likely lost.

 

The format is and was NTFS

The disk was formatted durind a Win XP install that I was running from a Packard Bell recovery disk. I believe that is a quick format. The various disc recovery tools I have used have shown files on the disc that appear to be files that would have been in the TIB file. Since the reinstall of windows I have only tried to read the disk.

Any help greatly appreciated

 

Did you try the photorec tool as suggested by jonyjoe81 above. It does the recovery work quite well. If nothing has been written to the formatted disk, this tool will find it. pci_filerecovery is another useful tool. BUT, if something has been written on your newly formatted disk, these data, whatever they are, and it can be the NTFS MFT for example, may have overwrite your tib files.

 

I have tried file recovery software and they all appear to find the files that were in the TIB file but not the TIB file.

 

That's just weird. The .tib file is a proprietary format, and I don't believe any file recovery software could read inside it. Therefore, there must have been files copied to the drive separately that you are seeing.

It might be worthwhile contacting the file recovery tech support to see if there is a limit on the size of file that their software can see.

 

I am running a thread on the R Studio tools software thread but there is no doubt that files that have never been copied to the drive are appearing in the list created by the recovery software.

 

Is it possible the file is to large for recovery?

 

R-Studio may have a limit.