Question

I use a Macbook Pro with Studio One 2 and keep all recordings/songs one an external hard drive. I accidentally portioned/formatted the hard drive and lost all the recordings/songs with Studio One 2. Is there any way I can get these back? I tried a couple recovery applications, and found the .wav files from recordings, but cannot get Studio One 2 to open these or open as a .song or .project...PLEASE HELP!!!!

Answer 1

Comsumed,

If you have formatted your Hard Drive, there is not a whole lot that can be done. Even with most recovery software, you will run into some issues; as the science is not 100%. Formatting a hard drive is for the most part highly destructive, as you have unfortunately found out the hard way.

This is why backing up and or having an external hard drive solely dedicated for backups is such a great idea. With the price of hard drives continuing to come down, one can pick up a 1TB HD for around $60US and you can backup quite a lot of data; protecting your work.

Answer 2

Not true at all, when you do a standard format on a hard drive, all that does is remove the table of contents. All of the data is still there UNLESS you start writing new data, then you'll start to destroy the original data.

When I do data recovery on a hard drive gone bad (won't mount, etc), first thing I do is format the drive so it will mount. THEN I can run the utilities needed to recover the data.

For Windows the utility is now free (I've used this one a LOT): https://downloads.tomsguide.com/GetDataBack-for-NTFS,0301-33764.html

For Mac, this one is highly rated, I have never used it in my gray Windows world: https://www.cleverfiles.com/mac-formatted-drive-recovery.html