How to restore and recover after a format
Putting things back has an order too. And if you formatted without a backup, the single most important thing right now is to stop writing to that disk.
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What to put back first
Everything lands on you at once in the hour after a format. A few of these steps create double work if you take them out of order. Done in the order below, each step makes the next one shorter.
Get online first
Nothing else starts until the network adapter has a driver. If you saved one to a USB stick beforehand, install that. If not, plug your phone in over USB and turn on tethering to borrow a connection long enough to download the proper driver from the manufacturer.
Sign in to your Microsoft account
Activation, several Windows settings and OneDrive all follow from this sign-in. If the machine was linked to the account before, activation often sorts itself out here without any further work.
Install your browser and turn sync on
Bookmarks, saved passwords and extensions all come back in one step. Doing this early makes every site you sign into afterwards much easier. It is worth finishing before you start moving files around.
Keep your second factor within reach
To every service you use, a freshly formatted PC is a device they have never seen. Expect an extra check at each sign-in. Having your phone authenticator or your printed backup codes to hand keeps you from getting stuck halfway through.
Bring the files back
Copy from your external disk, or download from cloud storage. A full cloud sync takes a while, so start it and go do something else.
Programs come last
There is no reason to install programs before your files are back. Game saves and program settings have to be written over an existing install, so keeping this order means you only restore them once.
Where it gets awkward
Some things do not simply drop back into place even when you did back them up. These are the ones that actually catch people.
- Bookmarks and saved passwords
- With sync on, one sign-in is all it takes. Without it, if you kept a copy of the old profile folder, you can still copy the Bookmarks file into the new profile — with the browser fully closed. Saved passwords will not survive that trick, though: they are locked with a key specific to the old installation, so moving the file achieves nothing.
- Client certificates
- If you exported them to a USB stick or your phone, import them back through the certificate manager. If you never exported them, you have to be reissued, and depending on the bank that can mean visiting a branch.
- Desktop chat history
- Messages you exchanged in a desktop chat client generally live on that PC, not on the service’s servers. If you did not export them before the format, there is nothing to restore. The history on your phone is unaffected.
- Mail collected the modern way (IMAP) comes back down from the server as soon as you reconnect the account. Mail collected the old way (POP3), or moved into local folders, is not on the server at all — you have to restore the backed-up profile folder.
- Fonts
- Select your backed-up font files, right-click, Install. Open a document before restoring its fonts and it will be laid out in a substitute face, with the line breaks and spacing wrong. The document is not damaged; the font is simply missing.
- Game saves
- Games with cloud saves come back with a sign-in. Otherwise you restore the backed-up save folder — but only after installing the game, never before. Reverse the order and the installer wipes what you just restored.
- Office templates, macros and mail signatures
- These live in a different folder from your documents. If you backed up only documents, they are gone. If your backup covers the whole profile folder, restore that folder.
- Windows activation
- Settings → System → Activation → Troubleshoot, then "I changed hardware on this device recently" and sign in — that clears it in most cases. Prebuilt desktops and laptops carry the key in firmware and reactivate on their own as soon as they are online.
If you formatted without a backup
Stop writing to that disk right now
A format is less an erasure than a note saying "this space is free". Until something new is written over that space, there is still something to recover. So the urgent task is not finding a recovery program — it is not writing anything more to that disk. That includes the recovery program itself: installing it there overwrites the very thing you are trying to get back.
Whether recovery is possible at all depends on the kind of disk and the kind of format. Honestly stated: on a current machine, the answer is more often no. Work out which case you are in before you start.
- SSD — usually not
- With TRIM enabled, which is the default, the controller clears space that has been marked as deleted, on its own, within minutes. That is why running a recovery tool a day after a format tends to return file names with nothing inside them.
- HDD — there is a chance
- The contents stay where they are until something overwrites them. The less that has been written since the format, the better your odds.
- Quick format or full format
- A quick format, the default during installation, only clears the index — the data is still there to be found. If you unticked that box and ran a full format, the drive was written over with zeros and nothing comes back.
- If Windows is already installed
- Installation wrote several gigabytes, and that much has been overwritten. The odds are worst for data that was on C:, and considerably better for a D: drive you never touched.
Check these before you run any recovery tool
A surprising amount of what feels lost is still sitting somewhere else: the recycle bin in OneDrive or Google Drive (usually kept 30 days), attachments on mail you sent to yourself, files you parked in a note-to-self chat, your phone’s automatic photo backup. Going through those first often ends the whole problem.
Stop using that PC
Merely opening a browser fills a cache, and everything cached is something overwritten. If you can, shut it down, take the disk out and work on it from another machine. If you cannot, at minimum stop browsing and stop installing anything.
Keep the recovery program on a different disk
Installed onto the disk you are recovering, the program overwrites the data it is meant to find. Run it from a USB stick, or from another PC with the disk attached.
Save recovered files to a different disk too
Writing recovered files back to the same disk overwrites areas the scan has not reached yet. Always point the output at another drive.
Check with a free tool before paying
Recuva has the simpler interface; PhotoRec cannot restore file names but scans more thoroughly. Paid tools generally let you scan for free as well, so confirm your files actually appear in the list before you pay for anything. A name that appears with a size of zero has already been overwritten, and paying will not change that.
If it truly matters, ask before you touch it
The attempt itself can make things worse. For data you genuinely cannot lose, contact a recovery service before running anything yourself. And no program recovers a disk that has failed physically.
Common questions
I formatted the drive. Can I get the data back?
It depends on the disk. On an HDD, after a quick format, with little written since, there is a real chance. On an SSD, TRIM has most likely cleared the space already, so usually not. Either way, the most important thing from this moment on is to stop writing to that disk.
Can I install the recovery program on C:?
Not if the data you want is on C:. The installation itself can overwrite it. Run the tool from a USB stick, or attach the disk to another PC and work from there.
Was the D: drive wiped as well?
If you formatted only C:, it is untouched. But if you deleted the partitions and repartitioned during installation, D: was reset along with everything else.
Can I restore just my bookmarks from a backup folder?
Yes. Copy the Bookmarks file from the old profile folder into the new one, with the browser fully closed. Saved passwords cannot be moved this way — they are locked with a key specific to the old installation.
Can desktop chat history be recovered?
Not unless you exported it before the format, because that history is not kept on the service’s servers. The history on your phone is unaffected.
Windows says it is not activated
Settings → System → Activation → Troubleshoot, choose "I changed hardware on this device recently" and sign in with your Microsoft account. That resolves it in most cases. If the licence was never linked to an account, you will need the product key.
The tool found my files but they will not open
The name survived in the index while the contents were already overwritten. Another program will produce the same result. Files listed with a size of zero are the same story.
Once everything is back
Pick the programs you used and we build the installer files. No hunting through vendor websites one by one.
Choose programs