i'd appreciate some help in terms of possible approaches or software that could recover data..
i have a raid drive which had all my audio libraries on it..i used a recovery program to roll back my day to day drive and accidentally selected the wrong drive to overwrite..so it overwrote the audio libraries disk...i kept a backup of it but it was too large to keep doing that so the back up is about a 1-2 years old..any tips on how i could use this as a good chance rather than seeing it as a fuck up?

 

u should try usin stellar phoenyx data recovery,it wil scan the disks to find deleted files and folders,then u choose what u wan t to restore,the only hassle is that usually id doesn t restore files with their original names,i.e if u restore music files u have to listen to them to rename them,i don t know how it behaves with other kinds of files,but it s the best solution i can think of to restore your data,but know it will be a long process

 

if your working on OS X the best data recovery software i can think of is a program called "Data Rescue 3", the retail price of Data Rescue 3 is 99$ for a single user license

heres the link to the developers site:
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

but you can purchase the program now in the new MacUpdateBundle promo deal for 50$ at:
https://www.mupromo.com/?ref=10378

 

Firstly I feel your pain...
...2ndly all is not lost (most likely).

Unless your drive was encrypted, or part of a raid array there is a good chance that you can get most of your data back. There are a few protocols that you might like to follow.

Since you are not trying to recover an os (from what i can gather) it should be straight forward.

MAC
1st which OS are you using? others mentioned mac, not sure if its the same but if it is same as it used to be.. turn it off NOW. Mac defrags on the fly and increases the chance of data being over written. Im not up to speed with recent mac recovery utils. Tech tool is one i used to use when I had a mac in the studio.

PC
To be safe, buy a new drive the same size as the old one.
Some recovery tools will miss some of the file types that we use in audio production.
Stellar Pheonix is good but it has some issues, such as rename and joilete size.
Active@ recovery is my prefered tool for data recovery, it runs from windows. But there are also a couple of dos versions for 'unerase' and 'partition' recovery for when thing are really bad ie dead os.
See NTFS.com for tutorial on how to use dos version (and learn the principles).

Now make an image of your old drive. You don't have to, but if you have project files on that drive you really should until you know what you're doing. There is an option in active@ to do this....
Scan the disc, select the old partition which was damaged and you'll be able to recover any data that has not been overwritten. So if your drive was really full prior to this event, or you over wrote with a lot of data then the chances are you've lost some which will be indicated.

If you are a little more confident...
Scan the drive with active@ recovery and recover the files that you are missing to another drive.

NEVER RECOVER A FILE TO THE SAME DRIVE AS ITS SOURCE (i have before but you're playing roulette)
You risk further overwriting the data that you are trying to recover!

I recommend you get another drive and make the image... the old one can become a backup once you've done

 

thankyou for your help..yes I'm using a PC..Windows XP SP3 ..
i've tried breifly with a recovery program..it seems the ghost of the image is on there..so thats something...what happened was that it immediately created a 40GB (the size of my day to day drive) primary partition on the drive, there is 1100 odd gb of unallocated space so i'm hoping most of its on there somehow the library total was just under 1100 as i recall so theres a chance....the recovery to the same drive would be the easiest way because i don't have 1100GB spare space between drives ATM...i guess another drive it is...unless it can be done in smaller pieces? .... i'm amazed at how much could go so wrong in so short a time.

 

Buy yourself another hard drive, it is the safest way to move forward with your problem.
Even if you don't image your original drive to recover the data, recovering your lost partition to the same drive is a NO NO! Espescially because some of it is already likely to have been over written.

If you only had 100gb used on a 1tb drive I might have said less risky but you are asking for trouble if you don't follow standard data recovery protocol.

I should point out that data recovery can be a lengthy process and requires a lot of patience.
One bad move and your data could be gone for ever!!

You might also like to note that there is a slight difference between data recovery and partition recovery.
However neither of the differences would change my advice.

feel free to pvt msg me for more hands on assistance!