Formatted my external by mistake - Lost 9 years of family photos, videos etc!!!!!!!!

I am new to Xbox, it belongs to my daughter. I had a regular flash drive in the machine to set up her profile etc..........Machine asked for more memory for a game. I being the jack *** I am thought " I have a Terrabyte right here" why go to the store at
10 PM.

I had no idea that the formatting was changing my entire External to Fat32? and I found out today that the only folder remaining on the Ext drive was "Xbox"

I have been on the phone with Tech, very sympathetic and as helpful as they could possibly be but noone can tell me how to repair or undo what I did by mistake,

Their best suggestion was to reach out to the forums and hope someone else has had the same problem and knows the resolution.........

I understand the format should go back to NTFS instead of Fat32. Does anyone have a safe way of doing this without loosing everything?

And if someone does know how to do this, will changing the format back automatically show all my folders and videos as they were before I screwed EVERYTHING up?

ANY HELP IS GREATLY APPRECIATED. 90% OF BOTH MY DAUGHTERS PICTURES ETC ARE JUST GONE.

I made multiple copies of some of the folders but not everything.

Please help

:)

 

Update wiped my hard drive

Agree the preview is to pick up on this type of thing

Disagree about the external device. Do you not back up your PC or laptop? To an external device?

I do. Mainly because I'm not going to lose my family photos and videos due to an OSX update fail or HDD malfunction.

 

I NEED HELP

I formatted my Xbox One, because I was having problems with a game, but I had important photos in the file explorer, and I lost them, so I wanted to know if I can recover these photos?

 

Sorry no way to get those files back when you configured that drive.

 

Tech informed me that DIY Data Recovery could do it but it is 100$ and did not seem to have any sign of a guarantee.

I would gladly pay if I knew it would work!!!!!!!!!This blows

 

First I'm going to state the obvious: When you plug in a USB drive and tell it to configure it for use on the console it prompts you on the screen that it will erase all data from the drive.

Now, onto the data recovery aspect of things. Data recovery could be possible because the console does a quick format by just deleting the FAT. If a low-level format was done--it wasn't--you'd be completely out of luck.

Bad news: Some data will be completely irretrievable because the new partition requires some sectors set up to identify it. Any data you have stored to the drive on the Xbox also damages what is left of your files. If recoverable some picture files will
show artifacts and color-banding because the sectors have since been over-written and cannot be recovered. Video files almost always suffer from artifacts and have A/V sync issues or a complete loss of audio. Document files almost always have corrupted text
within them. Directory structure and file names are also completely lost.

Good news: If you didn't store any data to the drive on either the Xbox or your PC then a good portion of your files should be recoverable to some extent. Again, you will lose the directory structure and the file names will be sequentially generated
so you will have to manually sort through every single recovered file and re-name it and put it in the appropriate directories.

A lot of professional data recovery services will charge a fee to see if data is recoverable but will leave it up to you if you wish to pay to recover the data completely. These places also charge much more than $100 unfortunately especially for a terabyte
worth of data.

 

I appreciate the information. I was on about 2 hours sleep at the time and should have been more aware of what I was doing. I did not even consider loosing years of data. I already started digging up data from cards, websites and other various areas. i will
never recover everything but I wanted to test the waters here before I did irreversible damage.

I will dig around on the Xbox once I calm down a bit and hopefully I get a portion back, Thanks guys for all your help. It is greatly appreciated.

The only thing I am not following is how or where to recover any data from the Xbox but I will read up on it. ANd of course use a clean drive,

Thanks again

 

The Xbox 360 uses a proprietary file system--FATX--and because of that Xbox data itself cannot be recovered.