I've done something VERY stupid.

My main internal hard drive on my iMac died, I got it replaced, getting it back with a blank drive. So I booted it with the boot DVD to format the drive and restore from Time Machine...

BUT...

I'm on massive quantities of Codeine at the moment (Have a bacterial infection in the bones of my foot which is MEGA painful) and Codeine in large quantities mucks with your head.

I set a format off on my external time machine disk!

Now as soon as I'd done it, I realised and pulled the Firewire cable on the drive... It was only running a quick erase not a "Zero all sectors" This disk mounts, but of course it's blank. I KNOW it's not gone through and zero'd out the data but...

Anyone any ideas, can I rebuild it with something? Can I at least get the data back, I don't mind sorting through, but I'd prefer to restore the whole Time Machine volume if that's possible...

I feel such a fool! 18 months data down the can :-(((((

StellarPhoenix or FileSalvage are my suggestions, but make note that you won't be able to restore the drive to its original state. Both only recover files, not folder structure or hierarchy. I believe they both have demos of some sort.

You would also need a big enough drive to transfer the recovered files to. With the way TM does its backups, either program would take hours if not days to run. You would have quite the task on your hands sorting through what recovered files are the most recent.

Ya think DW might work some magic?

Not with the drive being erased, it doesn't do that. The scavenge function works for damaged directories, not deleted ones.

Is 8 days up already?

Way too soon.

I was just thinking that if the directory wasn't completely erased....