So I purchased an extra external harddrive yesterday. Anyway, I woke up this morning and decided to format the harddrive so I could back up my other two, then put one of them in storage. So I click "Format harddrive" and it installed some computer program and formatted my OLD harddrdive - which was identical to the new one. I lost everything on it. I was absolutely devastated. So after about three minutes of freaking out, I got out my DVDs of all my client photos and realized I only had three client sessions on that drive -- and all of them had the final images. But I really didn't want to lose those files. So I started downloading all the photos from the DVDs and telling lightroom where to find the old files. In the end I lost nothing except two hours of free time.
My husband reminded me of his uncle -- a professional videographer/producer -- who managed to permanently delete 8 hours of HD video coverage of a project he was working on. Yes, he got 99% of it back after a few days of work. But still. It happens to all of us at some point. This is why you NEED a backup system in place. Both backup equipment when you shoot, and backup computer storage after the fact.
Moral of the story:
-if you have two identical harddrives, eject the one you don't want to format before you format the new one. Because those programs will reformat both.
-Don't diss on DVD backup. I don't use DVDs for long-term storage, but they can be a godsend if something completely unexpected happens.
I'll say it again... Nas box for backups, multiple harddrives for working, DVD's for short-term at the bank safe deposit box, and SmugMug Pro acct, for online backups.
Glad to hear you recovered what you had. I lost thousands of files once... never happen again.
Remember too, that formatting a drive or a CF card does not delete the images. It only prepares the drive to write new files. Once you write over the old files, then it actually deletes the old ones, so you can recover that entire drive if you do not mess with it and send it to a recovery place.
I have a scratch disc on my computer consisting of 2 300G drives in a mirror array. Everything that I import goes to that scratch disc to be processed. Once I'm done with the photos and after ordering etc, I move them to my server which has 5 1TB drives in a Raid 5 array. The only thing I'm not protected for is theft or fire. I'm working on that...
Remember too, that formatting a drive or a CF card does not delete the images. It only prepares the drive to write new files. Once you write over the old files, then it actually deletes the old ones, so you can recover that entire drive if you do not mess with it and send it to a recovery place.
-Zach
+1
But you don't even have to send it to a recovery place. There is some really inexpensive software that you can get to recover the information. I mean, the information is still there it's just the table gets rewritten to say that the drive is empty when in fact it's not. So then the OS thinks there is nothing on there. The software forces a run through the information and looks at the data structures and compares them to the possible data files they could be (i.e. hey this kind of looks like what a jpg should be, lets try that... yup it is, or this looks like a word doc let's try that and so on) Make sure that whatever program you do get can understand the format of files that you are trying to retrieve (i.e. NEF's, CR2, CRW etc...) Most should be okay now a days but it doesn't hurt to double check. Also, there are times when even if you write over a drive you can still recover the files, but it becomes rather slim. Most people will realize their mistake after a short while so chances are you will only lose a hand full of files as opposed to a whole drive. You might want to give it a shot on your drive just so that you know it's possible so if it ever happens again, you won't panic as you will have several options. It's better to run a little app and let it do it's thing than to go through a library of dvd's and figure out what you have to reload to be in business again.... Hope this helps...
Recovering from a format isn't usually that big of a deal...I know because I did basically the exact same thing you did . Scared the you know what out of me. It worked out fine though. I've got a 1TB RAID 1 array for all my critical storage, and a 500 gig SATA drive that I'm going to start using just for an "archive drive". I've an old fire-proof bank safe that I'll store it in (it's huge..about 6' tall and 4' wide). Just need to remember to keep it fresh . Ever since then, whenever I have to monkey with the drives on my machine, I just unplug all the drives I'm not working on...I'm not going to make that mistake again. And good luck on recovering your files...unless you wrote zeros to your drive or something, everything should still be there.
. Scared the you know what out of me. It worked out fine though. I've got a 1TB RAID 1 array for all my critical storage, and a 500 gig SATA drive that I'm going to start using just for an "archive drive". I've an old fire-proof bank safe that I'll store it in (it's huge..about 6' tall and 4' wide). Just need to remember to keep it fresh 
. Ever since then, whenever I have to monkey with the drives on my machine, I just unplug all the drives I'm not working on...I'm not going to make that mistake again. And good luck on recovering your files...unless you wrote zeros to your drive or something, everything should still be there.