Chances of recovering files from 3 years ago on an external HDD?

TheSource

TK Veteran
Hey guys bit of a strange one but my uncle gave me an external HDD 3 years ago. It had all his home movies on which he transferred to a bigger drive. I'm sure you've guessed it by now but that HDD has now broke. However the external HDD has only been used to store a few things on but has been formatted 3/4 times i guess over the years. What's the chances of recovering his home movies?
 
if it's been formatted a few times there's probably not much hope but Recuvva from Piriform, I used it once and it found some movies but not all.
It finds pictures better for some reason but might be worth a shot as it's free
 
if it's been formatted a few times there's probably not much hope but Recuvva from Piriform, I used it once and it found some movies but not all.
It finds pictures better for some reason but might be worth a shot as it's free

Great I'll try that. It's been formatted about 3 times only the basic format windows offers. However it has 250GB on it already and it's only a 500GB drive? I guess thats overwritten anything that was on it?
 
yes but recuvva can find files that have been overwritten

from memory, it was a fairly long and tedious excercise :(
 
photorec

really good and fairly powerful,
make sure you are recovering to a different drive than the one you are trying to read
 
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