RAID Recovery Tool that rules

OK, so I have a RAID5 (4 x WD BLACK 3TB) that I somehow (probably drunk) formatted. Shit eh? So i tried a few things one of them Esus data recovery. Took over a day and hadn't finished. Screw that.

So I stumbled across an app Called REclaiMe,

Highly recommended.

Would that fall more under a 'file system recovery tool' than a RAID one?

No, different. File recover actually searchs for all files, old ones and new, then makes you have to decide which is important or not, then move the files, rebuild the raid and then copy them over, verify and integrity check.

This tool just rebuilds a broken RAID (hardware raid), depending on which one and what parity you have.

Ah cool.

Although my main question is how do you have a broken RAID array by just formatting the file system?

If you format the raid, you still have the raid, just no data. To get the data back you need to reestablish what goes where.