I made an idiot mistake and formatted an external 1.4 TB hard drive that had data on it. I meant to just reserve a new partition via Disk Utility for use by Time Machine backups but accidentally erased all 250 GB of existing data on the external drive too.
I didn't do any kind of secure erase, so I'm pretty sure all of the data is right there but all the pointers to it are gone.
Looking online at Apple support and other links found via Google it seems these are the four utility programs most often suggested for recovering data lost this way:
FileSalvage v6.1.5 from SubRosaSoft
Data Rescue II from ProSoft Engineering
Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery v4.0 from Stellar Data Recovery
File Recovery for Mac from AppleXsoft
Price is just under $100 for any of them, so before I buy one I thought I'd see if anyone has used any of them, been happy or unhappy with the results, or has any other suggestions for data recovery on Macintosh.
Cleo? cd34? anyone..?
Note: I have not touched the external drive since accidentally formatting it. Nothing has been copied to it, so everything should still be right where it was.