Nov 3, 2023 11:56 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 3, 2023 11:57 AM by BiNBo.)
If you format a USB drive first in ext4 and then in FAT32 without overwriting the data in between, there is a high chance that the original files are still recoverable. If you want to make sure that the original files are not recoverable, you would need to use specialized data erasure software that can securely overwrite the entire drive with random data or zeros multiple times. To recover the original files in this scenario, you would typically need to use file recovery software, which can scan the drive for the old file structures and attempt to retrieve the data that hasn't been overwritten by the new formatting. However, the chances of successful recovery diminish if the drive has been used quite a bit after the formatting, as the new data may have overwritten parts of the old data.