Legit Reviews

It certainly is raining ca-ca on my little house in Sloan, NY, lately. My 5-month-old 2 TB, USB 3.0 external drive suddenly stopped powering up the other day trapping some 300 GB of my music collection along with nearly 500 GB of my movie collection, all my backups, downloads and a multitude of other files that I can't think of right now but will surely come back to haunt me as I again find a need for them in the future.

Sure the drive's still under warranty but I don't want a new drive, I want my files back!

I tried different USB cables, different USB ports, different power outlets, etc., etc., etc.. Nothing. So, as a last resort, I removed the drive from the enclosure, connected it to a spare SATA port and booted my machine. Drive's there and healthy but is classified as "Unallocated." Yippety-effing-skippety!

So far I have tried
Recuva: It locked up
MiniTool: Found ~40000 files but would not let me see them, move them or anything else for that matter

TestDisk 6.14 is running now but its initial scan did not seem very positive. It sees the drive but it doesn't seem too convinced it's going to be able to recover anything. Maybe it's just me.

Has anyone had a similar experience that had a happy ending? If so, please share with me what utility/tools/techniques/prayers/sacrifices you used. Thanks!!!

J

Sorry I don't, but I don't really use external drives, I have a USB3-Sata adapter I use with internal drives for backup so there is no software overhead and the interface usually goes before the drive inside does (And I have redundant storage on a server, that I periodically back up to that 2TB drive on a dongle, so 3 copies of every file minimum) And with all the drives I've had, have been very lucky about them dying, but at work we have external drives dying left and right, I got to the point of testing them with Crystaldiskinfo whenever I put one away

I haven't delved into it yet but I glanced at the TestDisk results on my way out this morning and it showed over 80 K files found. When I get back I'll see what's the next step.

if I dont get an email external to power up or connect first thing I do is pull the dive from the cage and hook straight to it.

if it fires up, then try to gain access to it, if can connect but no files, then break out the recovery programs.

backing up to a single location is not the best, two backups.

bubba wrote:backing up to a single location is not the best, two backups.

I know but don't know where to back up 300 GB of music! 800 DVDs? Planning to buy an additional hdd for that purpose but didn't have enough time. Sucks but that's life, for me anyway. Seems like TestDisk is the tool to use for this but it's a little hard to figure out. If I'm reading this right, it can repair/rewrite the MBR but at this point I'm reticent to write anything to the drive. I'm still working with it, taking my time. Hopefully I'll be able to recover some if not all of my files.

Documentation's a little sparse for this utility. It's open-source and more than a little confusing. Oh well, back to the mines......

Thanks for all the help thus far. I'll let y'all know how it winds up!
J

http://www.file-recovery.com/

Best program I have ever used and the easiest.

As far as backups go, yea, everyone should backup in multiple places but like you, I cant afford to backup my NAS with 5 3gb drives in it. Heck the bandwidth alone to try and put that stuff online would be staggering let alone the cost of storage. Sure, I could buy another NAS to back this one up to with that extra $1500 laying around lol

Backup your important stuff that cant be replaced to multiple places but things that can be re-ripped or re-downloaded, dont bother.

unfaithfulsfan wrote:

bubba wrote:backing up to a single location is not the best, two backups.

I know but don't know where to back up 300 GB of music! 800 DVDs? Planning to buy an additional hdd for that purpose but didn't have enough time. Sucks but that's life, for me anyway. Seems like TestDisk is the tool to use for this but it's a little hard to figure out. If I'm reading this right, it can repair/rewrite the MBR but at this point I'm reticent to write anything to the drive. I'm still working with it, taking my time. Hopefully I'll be able to recover some if not all of my files.

Documentation's a little sparse for this utility. It's open-source and more than a little confusing. Oh well, back to the mines......

Thanks for all the help thus far. I'll let y'all know how it winds up!
J

I run a 5 drive NAS with a RAID5 for daily access, and backed up to external once a month. The stuff I can't rebuild like family photos/videos I have not only on the NAS, and external backup, but on DVD as well stored off site away from my house in case the place burns down.

Movies and music can be re-ripped.

If you can't recover the data yourself... Before you RMA or return it you might want to check out how much a company like Drive Savers would charge you - http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

They can usually get back 90% of the data from 85-90% of the drives that get sent to them.

Just be prepared to be bent over... Usually data recovery from a failed drive runs $500 to $2700. ($500 for the slowest service – five to seven days on a drive up to 600GB I think)

If you call to get prices don't freak out on the phone and just tell them it's a personal drive with music and some movies on it. Might help the price stay down. I feel like those companies have you by the balls and if you are freaking out saying the cure for cancer is on there, that the bill goes up.

and remember to have redundant backup systems... yes, a backup of your backup even if it is just another portable USB drive.

Try Linux with the "dd" and "ddrescue" commands

http://vtopan.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/ ... ing-linux/

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?c ... &locale=en

Well, I lucked up in a small sense yet in a big way. I added an old 160 GB hard drive today and found that when I transferred the files to the external, I only copied them. And, for whatever reason, I didn't format the drive before I removed it from the system. That had the bulk, unfortunately not all, but most of my vinyl-to-digital files, thank God. Those were the ones I was most concerned about. I guess I had a backup after all.

After my 7th attempt to recover the data and getting "bad sector" results or totally unintelligible files back for my effort I just made peace with myself and formatted the drive. I'm moving back to my 500 GB & 320 GB drives and I created 3 partitions on the 2 TB drive for backups--maybe, once I decide to trust it. I just might create DVD backups as I go along. It's been a biscuit of a lesson to learn.

Thanks again for the help.