My brother was setting up a dual-boot system and accidentally formatted a 200GB partition on my Windows PC. It contained school and college memories going back to my childhood. I only found out about the mistake three months later. The computer has a 512GB SSD, and a data-recovery company quoted around INR 20,000 with only about a 1% chance of recovering anything. Is there any realistic recovery option, and what should I do before making things worse?
4 Answers
Check any existing backups before paying for recovery: cloud storage, an external drive, Windows File History, OneDrive, or copies on another computer. If there is no backup, this may unfortunately be a case where only partial recovery is possible. For irreplaceable memories, paying for an evaluation from a specialist may be worthwhile, but ask whether the assessment is free and whether the fee applies if nothing can be recovered.
Stop using the SSD immediately. Don’t install recovery software onto it, boot from it, or write anything else to the drive. If the files are genuinely important, the safest option is to have a reputable recovery service make a forensic image and work from that copy. Recovery from an SSD after formatting is often unsuccessful because TRIM and garbage collection may have erased the underlying data, especially after three months.
If TRIM was enabled, Windows may have told the SSD which blocks were no longer needed. The drive can then erase those blocks during garbage collection, making normal file-recovery tools ineffective. You could attempt recovery by booting from a separate USB system and saving recovered files to another drive, but every extra action carries some risk and the odds may already be very low.
The fact that nothing new was intentionally installed on that partition helps a little, but it doesn’t eliminate the SSD-specific problem. A formatted partition can sometimes be scanned, yet TRIM may have already made the files unrecoverable. In the future, keep at least two backups on different types of storage, with one copy disconnected or stored separately.

Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload