A school's LaCie d2 held the only copy of student records, lesson plans and administrative files. A quick format by a member of staff appeared to wipe the lot — folders gone, the drive showing empty. There was no backup. Because a format removes the map, not the data, we imaged the drive and rebuilt the file system to bring everything back.
A Belfast school used a LaCie d2 as the working drive for its office — pupil records, lesson plans, letters home and years of administrative paperwork all lived on it. During a tidy-up the drive was formatted by mistake. Afterwards it mounted normally but showed as empty: every folder and file appeared to be gone. With no second copy anywhere, the school faced losing records it was legally required to keep, so the drive came to us rather than being written to any further.
A quick format — the kind Windows and macOS perform by default — does not scrub a disk. It writes a fresh, empty file-system structure over the top of the old one and marks all the space as available. The original directory records and the file contents are almost entirely still on the platters; the operating system simply can no longer see them, because the index that pointed to them has been replaced. The one real enemy at this stage is new writing: every file saved to the “empty” drive risks landing on the sectors that still hold the old data. Stopping immediately, as the school did, is what makes a full recovery possible.
The drive was shelled out of its enclosure and cloned sector by sector to a fresh disk through a hardware imager behind a write blocker, so nothing we did could alter the original. It read cleanly, with no bad sectors — unsurprising, as the fault was logical rather than physical. All subsequent work was carried out on the image, never the drive itself, which means the original was preserved untouched throughout and every step could be repeated if needed.
Working from the image, we set the freshly written (empty) file system aside and searched the disk for the remnants of the original. The previous partition's boot records and file-table fragments were still present in their old locations, and the master file table — the catalogue that names every file and records where its data sits — had survived largely intact beneath the new one. By reconstructing that table and cross-checking each entry against the actual data on the disk, the original folder tree was rebuilt exactly as it had been, with real file names and the correct directory structure rather than a flat dump of nameless fragments.
Recovered files are only worth returning if they open, so documents and spreadsheets were checked at random across the recovered tree and record counts confirmed against what the office expected to find. Everything came back — the full set of student records, lesson plans and administrative files — with names and folders intact, delivered on a fresh drive. We also flagged the obvious lesson: a single working drive is not a backup, and a second copy would have turned a tense few days into a non-event.
Hardware imager with write blocker · file-system and partition reconstruction · master-file-table rebuild with data cross-checking. Imaging read-only, all work in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually, yes — a quick format removes the file-system index but leaves the data in place, so as long as little or nothing has been written since, the files can be rebuilt with their original names and folders. The sooner the drive is set aside, the better the result.
Not necessarily. New writing overwrites some of the old data, but often only a fraction, and the rest is still recoverable. Stop using the drive now and send it in; a free diagnostic will show exactly how much survived.
A logical recovery like this is typically a few days. You'll get a written quote after the free diagnostic, and on most jobs it's no fix, no fee.