Recover from disaster

[roger.burney]

I need to recover from the following disaster.
I was condensing my photos getting ready for new backup solution when I overlooked my mounting points and wiped all copies of the disks.

It gets worse. I was doing recovery on the disks when movers showed up unexpectedly, disconnected the disks that were connected external to my desktop, some as large as 5 tb

Then packed everything in storage with piles and piles of other disks no labels etc. and it has sat that way for several years mixing several systems on various versions of Linux and windows from dos forward.

Ok so now I need to wade into this mess and try to find and recover my data.

I don’t want to risk having a disk defragging itself. I hope to build a new system for this task and then use it for a normal system when I am done.

I would like to

1)run recovery software on each disk looking for jpgs and excel files and compile a directory of recovered files.

2)I guess manually look through this recovered directory and sift out recognizable pictures into a new directory.

3)Then go through the sifted files to organize them for duplicated into a new directory structure.

4) go through the duplicates after going through all disks and save the least corrupt copy, and perhaps use some software to combine copies that are corrupt in different areas into a not corrupted copy

5) picture by picture rebuild my photos structure.

HERE IS MY QUESTION

What hardware should I build to make it so
1) my disks do not lose any more data
2) my disk reads for recovery are as fast as possible?

I would also like any advice on choices of OS, recovery, and reconstruction software

Thanks

Ps. Yes it is hard not to be depressed and slog through this.

 

[popatim]

and it has sat that way for several years mixing several systems on various versions of Linux and windows from dos forward.

What does this mean?
Have the disks been used?

 

[roger.burney]

and it has sat that way for several years mixing several systems on various versions of Linux and windows from dos forward.

What does this mean?
Have the disks been used?

 

[roger.burney]

No, the disks have not been used since the wipe. They have been stacked in a box, so I do not know what system they are out of, what operating system, boot disk or data disk. I need to go through the whole pile and try to extract data.

 

[popatim]

Luckily erasing "mounting points" in windows does not wipe the data from the dest8ination. It merely breaks windows link to it so all you data should still be there.

I would use a usb harddrive dock with and easy to change out HDD bay (something like this one) and begin scanning the drives to see whats left of your data before delving into them with recovery software (I recommend Recuva and if you're a quick learner, TestDisk is very powerful)

 

[roger.burney]

Luckily erasing "mounting points" in windows does not wipe the data from the dest8ination. It merely breaks windows link to it so all you data should still be there.

I would use a usb harddrive dock with and easy to change out HDD bay (something like this one) and begin scanning the drives to see whats left of your data before delving into them with recovery software (I recommend Recuva and if you're a quick learner, TestDisk is very powerful)

I don't remember what OS I was using, I think it was Ubuntu. What ever I did wiped the file header blocks, not the link. I was already part way through recovery when the systems were packed up, and blended with several other disks. Truly added hay to the haystack with a needle in.

I have built a full new hardware system and am in the process of bringing up Mint 18.2 cinnamon. (Nothing like a couple of years without a computer to have a complete brain wipe) I have usb hard drive docking hardware but also have many accessible unused sata ports and power cables so I was planning on simply plugging direct to the mother board. What OS does Recuva run on?

 

[popatim]

I haven't run linux in a number of years but Gparted, PhotoRec, R-studio, and Testdisk all worked under linux.

 

[roger.burney]

will dig

 

[USAFRet]

I don't see how Gparted, PhotoRec, R-studio and Testdisk would help recover deleted files?

TestDisk
TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software!
TestDisk can
...Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem

PhotoRec
"PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks"

GParted
With GParted you can resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss, enabling you to:
...Attempt data rescue from lost partitions

 

[popatim]

You made no mention of deleted files. You only broke the mounting points which does not delete the actual files, it only breaks the link to them from the OS, so a simple file scan on the drives should bring them all back up.