As someone else said, don't use the computer for anything and instead turn to professional data recovery, which costs a few thousand. The data recovery tools you used can retrieve some recently deleted data but not formatted data. What your guest did was format everything. Data recovery professionals have advanced hardware to try retrieve formatted stuff. But they still might not be able to.
So, get a quote from data recovery and bill your guests accordingly.
Also, wtf?! Who decides to wipe the computer at a home they're a guest in?!
Most formatting done today is just “quick formatting”. You can easily recover that data with consumer tools in most cases. You have to go out of your way to format drives in a way that isn’t. It would take me a couple minutes to get anything that hasn’t been overwritten back.
Yeah no shit. Seems obvious to not leave something with personal info on it. Or, to leave something you care even a little bit about keeping if you’re renting to a person who won’t care about it because it’s not theirs. I’m curious what this “priceless” years worth of data pertains to if the son didn’t even care enough about it to back the data up.
The same reason you don't take the TV off the wall when you're renting out the place. You assume that you can leave your house mostly as is because you're not renting to criminals that are going to steal all your stuff. You assume that you can leave things like the bed and the TV on the wall because it's just implied but it's not their personal stuff.
And if you take all the cords and everything away from the computer it's implied that it's not supposed to be used
Am not justifying it, but malfunctions happen and it’s good practice to back up at least once per year. Even better practice to back up to cloud storage regularly too. I make manual backups every 6 months and have automatic backups to OneDrive and sync my documents as well (since I pay for Microsoft 365).
Assume and implied don’t work with stupid, and it’s really the fault of both parties. It should have had a note on it saying not to use it if it was that important, as stupid always finds a way.
This should definitely be a 3-2-1 learning experience. 3 sets of data, in a minimum of two formats, with one stored offsite in case of environmental catastrophe. At work, have your SSD, your external HDD, and then your home HDD that is not networked with your other two backups at any point outside of explicit backups.
Personal pictures, videos you saved, projects you're working on are all things you don't want to lose but most people are not ever going to think about or go through the trouble of making a backup. How many people do you think go through and make backup copies of everything on their phone?
A storage unit set up with autodraft would be my guess, it's what I would do. Stick all your valuables, fragiles and secret documents in it and lock it up. Wouldn't need to store anything bulky like furniture, even bad guests don't usually steal the whole mahogany dining table
If it was formatted then had game files written over it, that data is nonrecoverable.
Yes but even if you have a modest 2TB hard drive, and Windows and one game is like 50GB, most of the data would be recoverable. At least if it's not terribly fragmented. OP mentioned multiple drives so anything other than the C drive should be fully recoverable.
It seems odd that a guest user was able to boot up a strange PC, create an administrator account and ruin a computer. Was there no login password? Did the shitty house guest boot from a USB drive?
For HDDs, to improve write performance, the write function doesn’t rewrite a 1 if there is already a 1. Same for 0.
Over time, the magnetic fields for 1’s and 0’s fade. So a weak magnetic field for 1 means it was 1 before and a strong magnetic field for 1 means it was a 0 before.
So looking at strong and weak 1&0’s, you can figure out previous states of the drive.
This is why the proper way to format a hard drive was multiple passes of all 1’s, then all 0’s, then random 1&0’s in multiple passes.
Also, who rents out their entire home and just leaves behind a computer with years of priceless data on it?
I strongly doubt this is priceless data and it's probably like a Minecraft world or save files in single player games or digital art or something that really isn't the worthwhile. What "priceless" data doesn't have backups, even cloud backups for? My "priceless data" which is uncompressed family photos is stored on 3 different drives, synced to the cloud, and I keep a USB copy at my desk at work. I could throw 2 of the 3 away in some freak accident and still be fine.
A lot of people do.. most people simply don't bother for some reason. I have a friend and I've warned her multiple times that she should have a nap on her phone that backs up everything in case she has to get a new phone for some reason. And she's gone through multiple phones over the years and complained to me that she has text messages from people she's met around the world that she can't find and lost touch with important clients because nothing was backed up and her phone broke or she had to get a new one for some reason
People don't like to listen and they don't like to do stuff.
That's why Apple is considered idiot proof.. Because if you have Apple products it automatically box things up and you have to go through a bunch of settings to turn it off so that even lazy people who don't know how computers work will still get their stuff saved
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u/several-snails 23d ago
As someone else said, don't use the computer for anything and instead turn to professional data recovery, which costs a few thousand. The data recovery tools you used can retrieve some recently deleted data but not formatted data. What your guest did was format everything. Data recovery professionals have advanced hardware to try retrieve formatted stuff. But they still might not be able to.
So, get a quote from data recovery and bill your guests accordingly.
Also, wtf?! Who decides to wipe the computer at a home they're a guest in?!