All it takes is one momentary lapse of attention: you have just erased all of the contents of your backup drive by formatting it instead of the brand-new drive for backing up. Or, you may have inadvertently deleted photos from an SD memory card while they were still in the camera prior to importing them into the computer. Or your Windows install may have cheerfully “erased” the drive with all of its contents. A quick format (the default for most systems) is loud, but shallower than a full format, and shallow can be recovered from as long as no other data is written to the disk.
Quick formats write a blank file system onto the drive; this results in a brand-new directory structure at the beginning of the disk, leaving all of your existing data intact. Recovery will read beyond the new ‘blank’ area, find the existing directory/file structures or carve the data out directly and often return the majority of the original data. A full format on modern versions of Windows is far more destructive than a quick format because it wipes out everything in its path as it moves along. We would be dishonest if we did not tell you that you cannot recover anything from a fully-formatted area. In fact, the diagnostic can tell you precisely where a full format stopped wiping areas if it was interrupted and therefore how much data might remain recoverable. Either way, write nothing to the drive, and if the format was the first step of reinstalling Windows, do not go on to step two on that disk.
The same four scenarios of the above problems are repeated over and over again. There is the two-drive mistake (the user wanted to format D:, but instead formatted C:); there is the Windows reinstall that wiped out the partition where the user’s files were stored, even though they thought it would just bypass the files. There is also the “initialize disk” prompt obeyed by the user when an older hard drive’s partition table failed, which ended up formatting the drive because the user had simply misinterpreted what was going wrong. And then there is the “format” function accidentally performed inside the camera before an import was done. Each one recovers differently (which folders, which file types, with or without names), and the free diagnostic will tell you exactly which one yours is before you pay anything.
Yes, generally if you just had a simple quick format, and you stopped there, it should largely be recoverable. The new, blank index will sit at the front of your old data like a fresh coat of paint on a fully packed file cabinet. Only new writes cause odds to decay, so now the drive should simply stay turned off.
Generally harder: a reinstall completely formats the partition before writing gigabytes of OS files across the entire front of the hard drive. Most of what Windows does not write over (typically the majority of a much bigger drive) is likely still recoverable and may have no names, but the data is mostly intact. The diagnostic will map out where the overwrites took place and identify survivors at no cost.
The new photo could potentially be placed on top of the old one; however, because cards are larger than the photos taken with your camera, the chances of being able to recover some of your old images are good. If you stop taking pictures on it immediately, then the diagnostic process can determine how many images are still available for recovery.