Undeleting and Unformatting are too different things. Your chance of recovery is vastly different if you’ve formatted a hard disk versus simply deleting data. Formatting generally is a destructive thing especially if you’re security conscious and have it wipe the drive with random data. Deletion simply removes the file’s entry from the file system. In many cases, the data is still there (assuming you’re not writing new data to the disk).

Both times I did a quick format which if I’m not mistaken is just as good as removing the file entry and as and when new data is put on the drive the old data which was there is replaced. Further, on both occasions, I tried the data recovery thing almost immediately after formatting the drive to ensure that very little new data was written, if at all

NTFS from what I understand is pretty tricky to recover a file if you blow away the MFT (master file table) because small files are actually stored in the MFT itself. For all but very large files, the pointers to the actual file contents are also stored in the MFT.

Most of the files were big (close to 700 mb) and the software did recover them, however when I tried playing them, some of them gave me some sort of error or the picture would be totally messed up while the others played fine for a short while and later on would get messed up.