A quick format will take a minute or two, and only wipes the "table of contents" to be untechnical. A full format will erase everything, but will take ages with a drive that's dozens of gigabytes.
Yes.
I do full formats when it's a brand new harddrive, because it also tests for bad sectors by overwriting and testing each sector. Bad sector it goes back.
Quick formats just make the files "appear" deleted to the OS. Full format takes hours and hours, I think around 5-7 hours for a 1TB drive. Quick format takes a few seconds...because it just "hides" the data.
I don't have much sympathy for you either. Sucks ass but whenever you are partitioning or formatting a drive, you need to have your data backed up. Shit happens.
I charge my phone with USB on the PC, and have my important shit set to back up on it nightly (documents, photos, etc...basically shit I couldn't download again). It's also copied onto another one of the drives on the PC (1 x 500gb, 6 x 1TB, 1 x 1.5TB). Every month or three I'll also back it up on a DVDRW.
My 500gb external died one year, and it's where I stored the only copy of all my irreplaceable files. Pissed me off severely. Took out the drive and tried to set it up in my PC using a PCI SATA card, and it wouldn't detect the drive. Got pissed and abused the drive a bit. Fortunately, when I built a new PC, it loaded just fine and I got all my files back.
I just recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on the webserver. 24 days uptime isn't that impressive. I ended up with over 3 months on Windows 7 before I shut it off to install a new harddrive
Also, that was on the 7068 beta build. It's only been shut off when I was installing new hardware, during a power failure, or when I've moved.
I had OS X, Ubuntu 9.04, and Win7 RC1 installed on the same harddrive, used the Chameleon boot-loader. Cleared off all that shit when I installed Win7 RTM.