hello dear hdd gurus

i have expirienced a pretty big loss of data recently (downloaded malicous software which simply deleted my entire hard drive)

i have successfully removed the software and done a Windows System Restore, which recovered alot of the lost data (about 500gb data lost)

but many of the documents and pictures are still loss , ive used the tool "Shadow explorer" to recover some of it, sadly my pc has overwritten the furthest recovery point (the only one containing data from before the incident)


i have a couple of questions, but basicly, what would be the best method/tool to attempt to recover all the data ?
ive used a couple of free data recovery softwares, but they all were more or less bad, many of them were able to restore some of my lost data, but none came close to restoring all, and many of the textfiles are broken (not what they used to be)


i would really just love some basic advice on how to recover data, since ive never expirienced such a loss.

i know of some data recovery companies, im also not totally against using those, altho i would prefer to do what i can myself first , some simple advice in the huge sea of data recovery tools and methods would be very appriciated and helpful tho.

thank you very much for your time reading this and hopefully there is something we can do
and thanks for this great plattform i bet it helps alot of people

Hello

I'm afraid that using Windows System Restore (which as you said has recovered 500GB of data --and I suppose it wrote this data onto the same drive) was not a wise choice. Those 500GB that you recovered was written onto the same drive, overwriting other data.

Try R-Studio and see what it can recover. If the result is any good, then you can buy it and recover the data. But as I said, if the data has been overwritten, then it's game over.

PS. I thought System Restore would only recover system files.

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system restore restored all installed programms, but not all documents (text files, pictures, videos and stuff like that)

some of the programms are abit broken, most of them work tho (after the system restore)

ive also used shadow explorer AFTER ive done the restore successfully, but then some windows update installed, overwritting the old system restore point, which didnt allow me to recover from before the incident anymore

ive read the forum here abit and ive done a scan with UFS Explorer and active@ recovery , ive also R-studios website open and im gonna try their software next

UFS Explorer is alittle bit more complicated then the other programms ive used so far but the scan ive done shows me a couple of files from before the accident which arent on my pc anymore

ive done the "super scan" with Active@ recovery and that shows me over 400"local disks" in different conditions (from very bad too excellent) and ive opened those and these also contain some of the lost files (every one of those disks seems to be a copy of my entire system, but every one has different files in it while others are missing)

anyways if anyone can think of anything, like another software which could help, or maybe a way to recover lost system restore points (googled for that and it said impossible :p ) it would go along way


and im not sure if the system restore ive done overwritten that much because i have a 500gb harddrive, before ive had like 50gb space left, now i have 450 gb space left