Hard Drive Recovery?

[Jack Kavanaugh]

So, here is what happened. I am really stupid. Like, really really stupid.

So I have an SSD in my hard drive bay and an HDD in my optical bay with a bracket. System/Apps on the SSD, everything else - HDD.

Last night I tried dual booting linux and deleted everything on both drives by accident. Yeah. I had the SSD backed up so I can boot to OSX but since my entire home folder is now missing, I can only log onto the Guest account.

Am I going to have to reinstall Mountain Lion from the recovery partition or is there a way to restore everything from the hard drive I erased? It is around 170gb.

Pleaaaase advise. If I have to start over, it's not the end of the world - my music and movies are backed up so thats whatever its mostly just various documents I've accumulated but I would very much like to get them back, if I can.

Thanks!!!
Jack

 

[sgould]

Recovery software might work if it has just been erased once.

I ;looked at Disk Warrior but it was quite expensive, and it may not work.

 

[Satcomer]

Let this be a lesson to also have a clone (like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) or Time Machine backup on hand. SSDs tend to break immediately with no warning and don't die like old Hollywood films like the old spinning disk forms of hard drives did.

Also consider getting two externals and use one for backup and use the other as an iTunes Library holder. The blog post How to move an iTunes library to an external drive.

An extra hint for using NAS devices ( with not iTunes Server built-in) follow the steps at the blog post Configuring OS X Mountain Lion Time Machine to Work With CIFS (SMB) Share. This hint might help for NAS Time Machine service on NAS drives.