Great tool but... No warnings about data loss, SERIOUSLY???

The interface is sleek and intuitive, well done for this, but you’re helping people erase an entire DATA STORAGE item with a simple click. Thank goodness you did put a popup for large drives or I would have erased my whole life!
Though that popup does NOT mention data loss!!! It just says something similar to “Hm, this seems big, you sure you want to do that?” which gave me serious pause since it is the backup HDD of my recently stolen laptop.

Hard to grasp why that popup isn’t displayed for ALL drive size with a message more akin to “This will erase ALL data on this drive. Do you want to proceed?” kind of thing?

I understand it is free but… since it is open source, would you like me to change the text? :expressionless:

Cheers,
~P.

Hi

Thanks for your post - I think it’s a valid concern and maybe we can have a more verbose message. I have informed our devs that there is request for this to be added - do also see an existing ticket on GitHub discussing the same issue here

As you said, Etcher is an opensource project, so feel free to send a PR. If you do so, don’t forget to link the above issue as well!

Hi

I’m in need of help, I used Etcher on my backup drive, and now my whole life seems to have disappeared in a click. a 1.5T drive has been turned to 4MB drive with EFI file in it.

Is there a way I can recover/retrieve all the data I had saved in it? would really appreciate any help I can get right now.

regards
M

@Mohale what exactly were you trying to do? Flashing a drive will remove all data (or at least the FS structure used to find the files), so we would never ever recommend using it on a drive which contains valuable data without backups.

You may find some help using photorec https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec to recover the data, but ideally you should ask a professional.

Hi Cameron,

I was trying to flash an OS I downloaded to a bootable drive and used my backup hdd, because there was no documentation that alerted me about the data loss once you use Etcher. And of course I did not know that I will suffer data loss and drive will be reduced in size. However, I used MiniTool to scan the drive and I could see the Lost Partition with files that I need, but it requires licence key.

I will install and try out PhotoRec see if It will retrieve the lost Files.

regards

Mohale