Accidentally started to erase very important drive (Please help!)

[Matthewsavant]

So I went to erase a thumb drive to prep it for a music project but I accidentally hit selected my exteneral HDD and hit erase...I noticed in less than a minute, panicked and pulled the USB.

The external hard drive is 2TB and 500GB is partitioned to be Time machine for my iMac and the rest has literally everything on it that I cherish from the last 15 years...thousands of family photos, my massive music collection, my movie collection, text documents that have important passwords , tax documents etc etc all perfectally organized and stored.
Literally everything digital that’s important to me.

When I plug it in now, all of the time machine data shows up fine and that mounts but the “My book” partition with everything on it doesn’t mount and I have no idea what to do now...
I’m realizing the oversight of having everything on one single drive but that’s something that I can hopefully deal with after.

Does anyone have any recommendation on how to proceed to recover everything?
I did choose the highest security option when I went to delete BUT it had less than a minute to actually start deleting anything so I feel like there has to be a way to fix this.
I would appreciate any suggestions at all, I am in desperate need of help!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

If you were using a secure erase function, then it may have deleted the disk index which keeps track of files and their location on the drive. Normally, that index is at the beginning of the drive, so it may have been the first section to be erased, written to, erased, etc. using the high security erase method. You can find data recovery applications, but for the most part they don't work very well, and may cause even more problems.

Honestly, the best course of action is to stop using the drive and contact a data recovery company. If you continue to use the drive, you lower the chance of recovering any data. It can be quite expensive - several hundreds of dollars and up, and recovery is not guaranteed. Most of the things we would suggest could possibly jeopardize the ability to recover any data. We would hate for you to permanently lose you files trying this and that.

Sorry we can't help further,

C

 

[Peter Aretin]

So I went to erase a thumb drive to prep it for a music project but I accidentally hit selected my exteneral HDD and hit erase...I noticed in less than a minute, panicked and pulled the USB.

The external hard drive is 2TB and 500GB is partitioned to be Time machine for my iMac and the rest has literally everything on it that I cherish from the last 15 years...thousands of family photos, my massive music collection, my movie collection, text documents that have important passwords , tax documents etc etc all perfectally organized and stored.
Literally everything digital that’s important to me.

When I plug it in now, all of the time machine data shows up fine and that mounts but the “My book” partition with everything on it doesn’t mount and I have no idea what to do now...
I’m realizing the oversight of having everything on one single drive but that’s something that I can hopefully deal with after.

Does anyone have any recommendation on how to proceed to recover everything?
I did choose the highest security option when I went to delete BUT it had less than a minute to actually start deleting anything so I feel like there has to be a way to fix this.
I would appreciate any suggestions at all, I am in desperate need of help!

Disk Warrior. It can probably recover the deleted files. I had a 3Tb drive go bad and DW was able to recover the contents and move them to a new drive. It took it nearly a week, but all files were present and functional. Stop using the drive is good advice.