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Not a good way to start off the new year. I have a dual bay hard drive - one for audio and one for my sound library. The audio drive (with all of my master recordings) was starting to break down, so the company sent me a replacement. Long story short - I backed up all of my audio files onto the other drive bay, disconnected that particular bay from my computer and proceed to format the new drive. SOMEHOW it reformated both drives and I lost EVERY MASTER RECORDING from the past 4 years (over 700 songs). I have copies of most as mp3 or wav files, but all of my SONAR data is gone.I left messages at a few data recovery services to see if there is anything I can do, but if anyone out there ever experieced this and was somehow able to recover their files - PLEASE let me know. What really sucks is that I received interest from a publisher at the rally and I was in the process of finalizing all of my edits that were requested (been working on it since November - about 125 songs) and I lost it all. I'm not even sure what I should tell her. I really don't want to lose the opportunity but I'm going to need to re-record everything save a handfull. That situation is in addition to other companies that I'm working with and a new deal that I just signed where I needed to provide remixed songs as well. Any suggestions on how to deal with these situations would be most appreciated.Sorry for the rambling - just totally devistated. Worked so hard to get to this point as I'm sure all of you can identify with. Any thoughts would be most appreciated.Best,Dave

Damn Dave.I hate to hear this stuff. I dont know much about data recovery but I am now in the habit of backing up every session. Ive seen so many stories about this that im paranoid now.I hope you can get all your data back!M~

Thanks Matt. It just came down to plain old stupidity and impatience. I'm normally very good about backing things up, but I was in such a rush that it didn't even cross my mind to make a double back up while switching drives. I paid the ultimate price. Man - words can't even describe....

Dave,That is a total nightmare. Definitely contact a few data recovery companies and see which one gives you the best results. It may cost a few bucks, but with 4 years of material to recover, I think it might be worth it.Like Matt, I too got into the habit of backing up everything to CD/DVD. I'd even consider uploading to an external server if it weren't so expensive and time consuming.Best of luck.

That's terrible Dave!If it's a straight format, one of these might help:http://www.tucows.com/article/1711http: ... s.com/Hope so!Dave.

...this may help: http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizar ... mchuckEDIT: it looks like we all posted at the same time!! Let us know if anything works...

Guscave, Dave and Chuck - Thanks so much - I'll let you know. I just got my first quote actually - $1,500.00 with no guarantee. Guess I'll keep looking for a bit...Thanks again,Dave

Damn. I hope you can recover your songs. I recently did something similiar & lost a bunch of project files that weren't backed up, I'm convinced that they're still on my 'puter somewhere.Good luck & my fingers are crossed for you.

Dave.. I'm so sorry to hear this... Man, my stomach just sank when I read your post. I wish there was something I could do to help. - Big Blue

I'd try one of those programmes first Dave.I've used Get Data Back before, and it finds files like magic.Try a free download, and run a scan. It'll show up anything thatcan be recovered. Then at $69, it's a fraction of that company's cost.http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm