Are you habitual of saving a backup of a hard drive to an external hard drive? We hope so! Well, it is the smartest move for saving data. But what if all your drivers are corrupt and your system needs data recovery? It only demands reformatting without losing data. But it might not be easier to do that alone!

Well, with proper guidance and tips, you will be able to do HDD data recovery. So, for your ease, we have enlisted top points for learning reformatting without losing your data.

Let us clear you, “format drive” and “data recovery” are not mutually exclusive terms. You need to format your drive and then use data recovery tools.

Learn to Reformat on Devices 

Reformatting External Hard Drive on Windows

  • Reformatting the window’s external hard drive is very simple.
  • Start with connecting the external hard drive by a USB port.
  • Windows will recognize the drive in a few seconds.
  • Go to File Explorer, now click on This PC (left-hand column), and then on the shortcut.
  • Choose the devices and drives of the main window.
  • Now Right-click on the icon – drive for accessing the context menu.
  • Click on a format by the list.
  • Tick the Quick Format box
  • Let other settings remain the same.
  • At last, click on the Format button, wait for the completion of the process.

Make sure that the Quick Format checkbox is ticked otherwise, choosing full format might head you towards losing all data.

Also Read: How To Recover Data From Desktop Computer?

Reformatting External Hard Drive on MAC

Well, macOS doesn’t contain a Quick Format box; however, you can save the data from losing by doing a particular setting.

  • To start, click on the Finder app.
  • Now choose from the left-hand panel choose Applications
  • Scroll down for choosing the Utilities folder.
  • Then open the folder and choose Disk Utility.
  • Click on the left-hand side, you will see an external hard drive.
  • Choose your drive’s name.
  • Now choose the top of the window, then select the Erase button.
  • It will wipe the drive.

Don’t proceed because you have to click on the Security link. Ensure that the slider is moving from the left of the scale.

When your slider isn’t in the correct place, you might lose all or some of your files. Therefore, after that data recovery process is impossible.

Please don’t write the new data on your hard drive. The new data might overwrite over the old files. Well, overwriting would not be done on a file-for-file basis. If you send a new file to an external hard drive, it may corrupt numerous files that need to retrieve.

Furthermore, you can opt for the data recovery app. There is numerous software that is suitable for finding files on a hard drive. You don’t need a catalogue for this.

If you lose data every time you format, then we have a solution. Your external drive might become corrupted so, for this, you need to keep data backups in different folders or places. For instance, you can have the backup on local devices or store backup copies in cloud storage.

It’s simple, the more you backup, the less you need to worry.

Final Words

In an external drive or local drive – you need to change the file system to fix corrupted files (due to disk failures) and improve computer performance. Now, you might have believed that it is not impossible to save data while recovering.

Hopefully, the above-listed tips will be helpful to everyone for computer data recovery. Right from a layman to an expert, anyone can apply the techniques. 

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