So due to a recent act of stupidity and bravado, I uttered the words "backups! who needs backups?!" and what followed was the tragic loss of 260gb of data.

This scenario in particular is requiring me to recover a repartitioned hard disk, but I was wondering what tools people here use in general to recover lost data.

I'm sure everyone has been there, either accidentally rewriting files, resaving an old version, computer crash, hard disk death, user deletes an important document etc. So was thinking it might be an interesting point of discussion as to what you guys use to recover lost data.

I appologise if this is considered irrelevant, but considering there has been a few recovery questions, I think this might be interesting.