Shaun Cichacki
2026-01-17 13:00:00
It may be slightly overkill, but I currently have three different drives in my PC. Currently, I have an SSD that houses my OS and a few smaller games, leaving enough room for Windows to function properly. Alongside that, I have an NVMe drive that houses a massive collection of games that I’ve organized together from Epic, GOG, Steam, and other libraries. Finally, I have a 2TB Seagate Firecuda that has all of my photos, videos, and other files that I don’t use as often. Well, for about 20 panicked minutes on a Saturday afternoon, that HDD was completely cleared out, due to a complete mistake that I made.
I ran to Google, hoping to find out if my Disk Manager mistake could be remedied. That’s where I discovered TestDisk, and I need to sing its praises, because it saved everything I thought I lost.
TestDisk feels like a miracle worker
I thought I was up the creek without a paddle
To put my embarrassment on the front line, I meant to select a flash drive that I had inserted to delete and format. But shortly after selecting Delete Volume, I realized that I had picked the wrong drive. An honest mistake that had me reevaluating all the choices I made up to this point. So, I jumped onto Google and started searching to see if it was possible to recover what I’d just deleted, since I hadn’t formatted the drive.
Before coming across TestDisk, I tried a few other recommended programs, only to find they couldn’t do what I needed. But TestDisk’s step-by-step guide was incredibly useful, and I was able to completely salvage everything that I thought I lost. If you find yourself in a similar situation, read through every step carefully and follow it verbatim. Take your time, and hopefully you’ll be just as lucky as I was.
- OS
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Windows, MacOS, Linux
- Version
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7
.3 - Plan Options
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Free
- Services
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Data Recovery
Using a terminal-based UI wasn’t as hard as it looked
Don’t let the interface scare you away from trying this one out
Using the terminal is something that a lot of Windows users likely don’t do. It’s completely understandable why they may not do so, either. It’s rather daunting, especially for someone who isn’t accustomed to it. Linux users seemingly love terminals and command lines, and while I’m slowly learning more about the Linux world, trying to navigate through a terminal while in panic mode was slightly terrifying. What would happen if I input something incorrectly?
After calming myself down a bit, I realized that this was nowhere near as terrifying as it looked. There are a fair number of steps that users will need to follow, but as long as you read carefully and follow all of the prompts as shown, this should be possible for users of all skill levels. If you’re a visual/audio learner, this tutorial by Freebooter on YouTube can also guide you through the necessary steps to recover your data.
TestDisk saved my data and taught me a lesson
Sometimes, slow and steady really does win the race
It feels like every day is moving by faster and faster for some reason or another. Or at least, it does to me. But if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that I need to slow down and make sure that I’m making the right choices before committing to them. To be fair, this was an incredibly great learning experience — but it’s one that I don’t want to have to revisit if I don’t have to. By taking just a few extra moments to review the changes that I was making, instead of trying to fly through Disk Management as quickly as possible to get back to my current project, I would never have had to test this out.
But, in a way, I’m glad that I almost lost all of my data. Does that make any sense? I learned about a fantastic program, one that I may not have otherwise discovered. More than anything, I learned that I need to slow down and take things one step at a time, even though I’ve been using these particular programs for as long as I can remember.
If you already formatted your drive, it may be too late
TestDisk seems like a miracle worker, but even it has its limits
Data Recovery is scary, especially if you’ve done something you may not be able to come back from. Thankfully, I had only deleted the partition and hadn’t formatted my drive after I realized what I had done. While I have not had to test out this feature, TestDisk may only be able to do so much if you’ve fully formatted the drive that you’re hoping to recover. There may still be some hope if you’ve gone a step further than I did, however.
Some folks on Reddit’s r/DataRecovery have mentioned that other programs like R-Studio or GetDataBack may work better than TestDisk if the drive has been fully formatted. As I mentioned before, I have not had to test this out myself, so I cannot speak to the results that other users have had. I will say that if these programs work half as well as TestDisk does, then they should be pre-installed on every PC like other open-source programs should be.
I’m beyond grateful that TestDisk exists
But I’m also going to start backing my stuff up now, just in case
I’ve spent an awful lot of time building a proper offline library of my media, music, and videos. If I were unable to recover this partition, I would have lost a ton of pictures and videos that mean the world to me. Pets that I’ve loved and lost over the years, memories of my younger years, and so much more — gone in the click of a button. I realize now that I need to be smart and start making backups of all of this.
Now, I just need to decide whether to back up everything in the Cloud or invest in a massive external hard drive to start backing up everything onto. Maybe I’ll go with the second option, since TestDisk does work on external hard drives, too. Who knows — knowing me, I’ll end up doing this again at some point or another.