had computer formated

[dorindarasbe]

hi all, my mum died suddenly on 5th november aged 57 and had wrote my 2 sisters and myself a letter each on her computer. about 2 months ago her laptop was playing up and my cousin formated it for her and wiped everything off including the letters that she hadnt got round to printing out for us. as you can understand we are absolutely devastated as this was the last thing we could have had from her and now it seems to be lost for ever. does anybody please now if there is some way that these could be retrieved somehow? we dont know alot about computers but are just praying that our letters could still be in the computer somehow. any help would be so much appreciated. thankyou so much. xxxx

[EuanC]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4500482. stm

This story appeared on the BBC website a few weeks ago.
If you read through it you will see that there is a company called On Track who do data recovery. They may be able to help you.

[mikeyp]

Sorry to hear about your difficult situation. Depending on how the computer was formatted, it may still contain some of the files you want back. As EuanC said a data recovery company is your best option. An example of one is:

http://www.data-recovery-direct.co.uk/

I suggest finding a company you like the look of and phoning them up. The quicker the better however, the longer a file is deleted the less likely it is to be successfully retreived. I'd turn the laptop off and keep it off immediately.

[Kerplunk]

I have used Ontrack before and they will charge about �100 to have a look at the laptop. Then they will tell you what they can recover and for how much.

Best of luck.

[yellowjohn]

i did the same thing with accounts stored in excel which i left on my pc when i reformated.
i got them back by googling free excel recovery tool and although it was a free trial it let me see the accounts so i could type them out and re enter them in excel this was 3 months after a re format with lots of software back on my pc. so if your letters are in word for example just google free word recovery tool and i am sure all is not lost.
good luck.