Do This Right Now!!!
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That's incredibly bad luck, Kris. I really feel for you...especially in view of the fact that you've been able to recover virtually nothing...and the thought of how this must be affecting your custom house plan business is truly terrifying.
You say you've lost the entire 14 years work. I know this is no consolation...but in the spirit of your original post (a lesson to others); how did you manage to go 14 years without backing up at all? By that, I mean...presuming that you have bought new PC systems in that time, how did you transfer the data from your old PC to its replacement?...or upgrade you OS? (I see you're now on Windows 7)
Do you still have any old machines lying around, or given to relatives, that might have been reformatted but not had too much new stuff loaded onto them yet? They might be recoverable, even if your work machine isn't. -
Sorry to hear.
Have you installed on top of the data or is the PC just saying the drive can't be read?
Why I ask is because I "lost" a drive that couldn't be read even by several recovery software.
Eventually it turn out that if I turned UAC off (in Windows Vista/Windows 7) and restarted.
It all came back. -
Sorry to hear of your situation. We have got good results with Norman-Ibas data recovery. Part of http://www.krollontrack.com/ (pick your country from the list).
About recovery programs, GetDataBack for NTFS has worked well, if data is not badly overwritten or disk is not physically broken. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm -
Another vote here for "carbonite". Very cheap for the amount of storage you can get and its been a life saver for me on a couple of occasions. Also a handy feature is that you can remotely access all your backed up files no matter where you are in the world. Handy when you realise you left that all important client presentation back at home when your a thousand miles away!!
Data recovery specialists seem to be a licence to print money. I've never known anyone that has been able to recover data from a wiped/trashed hard drive. All you ever get is a large bill!
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