Homebrew Restore deleted files from harddrive formatted to WBFS

[Zaptagious]

Hey, I have a question. A couple weeks ago I got a Wii U and an extra external harddrive to put games on but I accidentally formatted the wrong harddrive and lost a ton of files I've been saving up for pretty much my whole life.
I figured they were lost forever so I ended up just putting a whole bunch of games on it. But then I heard it's possible to restore files from a harddrive after a reformat.

I tried using a data restoration program but it couldn't find the harddrive since it's formatted to WBFS. Is there a way to retrieve the files from it anyway? Like some sort of exploit to make the harddrive detectable, or just format it to NTFS or exFAT so it can detect it then?

When do files actually disappear permanently?

 

[Cyan]

you can find files if you don't write new one to the disk.

Writing new file overwrite the old data (now being marked as free spot to write new files).

Your previous partition was FAT32 or NTFS?
If it was FAT32, you can try to convert the WBFS partition to FAT32 again (using wbfs2fat to not lose games).
If it was NTFS, format to NTFS (quick format), but you will lose your games.

There will be very little chance to recover files if you already formated to another partition format and added files to it.
You need a program to scan all the drive to list data it finds, but it could be corrupted, without filename, etc. very hard to recover it.

 

[Zaptagious]

I see, thanks a lot for the quick and thorough answer! Well I guess I'm gonna try to reformat to NTFS and look for the files. It doesn't matter much if I lose the games, I have them backed up anyway. However, I'd want to backup the savefiles for the games, but I'm not sure whether these are saved on the harddrive where the actual games are stored, or on the SD card where I have the software for USB loader, or somewhere else entirely?

 

[Cyan]

saves are stored on the Wii.