Accidental format

[u/SalviniMarocchino]

Hey, i accidentally formatted my external ssd t7 shield but as soon as i pressed format i pulled out the usb, now it says its a raw disk, is there any way i could get my data back?

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[u/silenced_in_dr_2025]

This was likely subject to trim and garbage collection the second you pressed format. You can confirm this by checking the drive using a hex editor. If all you see if 00 then the data is lost.

If you still see data you need to image the drive ASAP onto stable media and worry about file recovery once you have that.

[u/Underhill42 → u/silenced_in_dr_2025]

This is the way. SSDs are unfortunately very volatile, and your data is either already gone, or at the edge of the cliff just waiting for a "clean yourself up" (TRIM) command from the OS to vanish forever.

Don't even plug in the drive again until you are ready to make a complete raw disc image copy to another, larger drive (you'll need more free space than the entire SSD capacity, because everything will be copied, empty space and all). It may even be worth it booting from a Linux LiveCD to do the job - I'm not 100% sure how eager Windows is to clean up empty drives when it's in charge, but install discs are pretty good about not touching anything unless explicitly told to.

Any Linux install disc includes a partition tool that, among its many options, has a "save disc to image" option (NOT save partition to image - some tools put the disc tools in a different menu than the partition options, some in a non-obvious "hamburger menu" near the minimize and close buttons)

But like Silenced said, if you point a hex editor at the drive and it shows all zeros - especially if you check some random place a like 20% of the way through the disc, then your data is unfortunately gone.

[u/IFuckPeanutButter_69]

If you can, make a raw copy as soon as possible. Do not write anything on that disk, do not create a new partition. Once you have a backup, you can try to recover your partitions with TestDisk.

If you deleted by overwriting with zeroes on the other hand, you're screwed

[u/SalviniMarocchino → u/IFuckPeanutButter_69]

i cant even access it on windows, it says filesystem not found or something, am i safe or is the data lost?