[SOLVED] Need help recovering data accidentally lost when converting USB drive to boot USB

[r8cefan88]

While I was away at work my father had converted one of my two 32 GB USB drives into a boot USB, using a differing version of windows 10 to see if that would fix the issues I have been having relating to pre-installed applications not functioning. What he did not understand however, was that the files on the USB drive would be deleted when the drive was converted to a boot drive. He also just happened to choose the one USB in which it mattered that it wasn't wiped, as it contained all the files I was backing up from having just reformatted the computer earlier to try to solve this problem. I have now lost over 17 GB of files spanning several thousand hours of work and do not know how to recover these files if it is at all possible. Any help would be appreciated with this issue.

 

[camieabz]

Piriform's Recuva? Free, so worth a shot, but if the deleted files have been over-written, forget it.

 

[karenjoly]

You have my deepest sympathy. In a less liberal world, dada would be in a world of hurt.

 

[USAFRet]

1. Possibly Minitool Partition Recovery:
https://www.minitool.com/free-tools/minitool-partitionrecovery.html

2. Possibly TestDisk
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

3. Why was there not an actual backup of this data?
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html
(a backup is a second or third copy, not the only copy)