I Accidentally 3 TB

So Saturday night, after Microsoft had released the new Windows 10 Tech Preview, I was going to make a USB installer for it, and install it to a secondary HDD on my PC. Fairly standard. I decided I’d start off by formatting the drive so I’d have a clean base to copy the installer onto, just in case there was anything on it that could have conflicted with the installer. I right-clicked the drive in This PC, clicked Format, and confirmed the format with default options. I then left my computer for some reason.

When I returned, I remembered I was going to make a USB installer, but when I looked at the drive I’d formatted, it said 2.72 TB free. That’s a bit weird for a 64 GB USB flash drive. It took me a minute, but then I realized it. I’d formatted my storage space. The storage space that contained literally all of my things. It was redundant, storing each file on multiple disks, but I’d explicitly told it to format them, so it did.

About 20 hours later, I’d done a partial recovery of the disk. So far it looks like about 1/3 of the data is gone for good. This included most of the photos I’ve taken since getting my camera, and almost all of my downloaded media. Interestingly all of my virtual machine images are fine. I’d definitely trade those for my photos back, but oh well.

I’m probably going to switch to daily backups now.