RE: External hard drive has lost all its data
February 24, 2019 at 10:50 pm
(This post was last modified: February 24, 2019 at 10:52 pm by fredd bear.)
(February 24, 2019 at 7:22 pm)Abaddon_ire Wrote:(February 22, 2019 at 9:04 pm)fredd bear Wrote: About a year ago, I bought a LACIE 500Gb external hard drive, I wanted to have a drive which used an external power source.
Used it for larger files, mainly videos, a total of about 350GB
Had not used it for about 6 months.
Yesterday,I attached it to my Imac. When I opened it, the only thing showing was one folder; "BUDA"
As far as I'm aware it's unusual for a hard drive to suddenly delete everything. That leads me to believe there is a software issue. That the files are probably still there.
I also have a laptop, which runs Windows 10 and Linux Mint Cinnamon, as dual boot.. have also tried the Lacie drive on each OS. Same result.
Does anyone happen to know of any troubleshooting I can do?
I will not rehash the answers already given, but in a professional context, I have been that soldier. There exist professional companies that can retrieve data from dead HDDs. They are mostly successful, but they ain't cheap given that they do a clean room tear-down of the dodgy drive to the bare plattens if necessary.
I have twice had to engage such on behalf of clients. In both cases it was 100% successful and oddly also LACIE drives. In both cases it was horribly expensive, yet cheaper than a total loss. I am glad it wasn't on my dollar.
All fixed.
I really hate relying on computers. I usually buy a new one every three years. Probably not this time. Although expensive, the Imac
is proving to be the best computer I've ever had. I also prefer Mac and Linux to windows.
Was pretty sure the problem was not hardware. As far as I'm aware, a hard drive will simply not suddenly delete everything, that failure of the drive tends to be gradual. .Turned our it wasn't the drive.
I found a free app called "Disk Drill" . It took a few hours, but it found EVERYTHING on that drive. That meant approving each file I wanted recovered. That was then saved to a folder. I was actually quite surprise at how few files I needed to recover. I had most of those files backed up on my Imac
After getting everything I wanted, I formatted the drive and have added another folder, with video files totalling just over 100 GB. I will monitor that and see what happens. I suspect the hard drive is on its way out---I couldn't find a new hard drive using external power, so bought this one second hand. Last time I'll do that.
I don't suppose external SSD are available at a reasonable price ?
Thank you for your reply.
