I might lose all my art (Patreon)

So, in my attempt to update to Windows 10, I have made a terrible, terrible mistake.

As I was downloading the Windows 10 installation software, it gave me the option of putting the software on a USB drive, so for convenience sake I chose my external hard drive. What I didn’t realize until it was done was that, rather than simply put the files on my drive as I assumed it would, it reformatted my drive from a 1TB storage drive to a 32GB installation drive, causing over 10 years worth of drawings and other files to become unavailable to me, possibly even deleted, with only Windows 10 installation software in its wake.

Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this. I may have lost hundreds of drawings, many of which haven’t been seen by anyone but me. Thankfully I have a tiny window of hope: I downloaded a special recovery program from the manufacturer’s website and am currently allowing it to search for and recover my precious files. It’ll take hours, but it’s better than nothing.

UPDATE: Thanks to Seagate, I managed to recover pretty much  all my files. The only snag is that they’re all in one folder rather  than the neat and organized folders I had them in before, and all the  files are named “FileJPG_0000″ or something like that. But despite that,  they’re still there.

Some of my files seemed to have been damaged  or something, mainly the old Photoshop PSD files for all my drawings.  I’m currently looking for a way to restore them to their rightful state,  but if I can’t, it’s not too big a loss personally.

Anyway, now I  just have to re-sort all of them. It might take me days, but it’s worth  it to have all my old stuff back. I also got a new external hard drive  to put it all on- I don’t want to touch my old external until I’m sure  everything is more or less back to normal.