Formatted and lost 6 years worth of photo memories.. any way to get this back?

Solution 1:

This answer may help you. It was for recovering data on an Android phone but I believe it would apply for hard drives as well.

From this answer, I have personally used PhotoRec. Not the easiest to use as I had to use the command line ( a couple years ago anyway), but it works.

Solution 2:

You may wish to take a look at this: Recovering deleted data from deleted partition- solved

It's quite long, my personal experience when I accidentally removed the whole partition on a 500GB HDD.

The procedure I used is documented at the very bottom, placed here for your convenience:

IMPORTANT: Try not to use forensic recovery procedures and not to use MS based recovery tools in the first instance.

1. First of all you calm down. Tranquil, if you erased or removed the partition's table, the data is still there. You need to find a way to bring it back, that's it.
2. The most you can keep the drive off new data, the best for your data. If you write new data, the older data will be replaced by the new as this starts using the clusters.
3. If possible, try not using MS based tools, which (in my case) just wrote a few clusters in the disk which made unusable some data. MS Recovery Tools (such as Easy Data Recovery and others) tries to read the partition table but it also writes some clusters which can't be fully read in order to recover the "usable part of the data". This may harm your data replacing the original allocation clusters with blank data which allows the software to gain access to the cluster itself.
4. Follow the instructions shown on the video documented by amzertech, which was embedded in the previous post and that clearly explains exactly what I did in order to recover my data.
5. If you follow these instructions, I am sure you are going to succeed. Even in the worst cases (how can a different case than mine be worst?) you will succeed if you follow this easy instructions. Remember, the data will remain intact if you leave the disk intact. The most things you do to the disk, will be the most risk your data is reaching.