Worst feeing in the world!!!

I had a WD external die. took the housing apart and seperated the drive. bought a SATA jumper wire and installed it as a slave directly in the PC. it's been working for two years. was a bad power supply in the external housing.

samsen wrote in post #16556443
Sorry for what happened but yes there is a good chance to recover it.
Out of curiosity, what was the brand of your HD and how old was it? Also did it give you any warning sign before dying, say weird sound etc?

It's a WD 500gb and it's about 2yrs old. It gave no signs of problems before. I just downloaded some Christmas pictures on it on December 25. I wanted to look and some pictures a day after and everything was showing up with a ? mark. My heart dropped as everything I clicked on was showing the same. I did removed the cover off it and bought a jumper and no luck reading the drive.

I'm taking the drive to a data recovery center today. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it can be saved and does not cost an arm and a leg.

BTW, free inspection and it's a local company in Pleasanton, Ca.

burnaz wrote in post #16557490
It's a WD 500gb and it's about 2yrs old. It gave no signs of problems before. I just downloaded some Christmas pictures on it on December 25. I wanted to look and some pictures a day after and everything was showing up with a ? mark. My heart dropped as everything I clicked on was showing the same. I did removed the cover off it and bought a jumper and no luck reading the drive.

I'm taking the drive to a data recovery center today. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it can be saved and does not cost an arm and a leg.

BTW, free inspection and it's a local company in Pleasanton, Ca.

Strange as when driver's internal motor is at fault usually it gives you many warning signs such as high pitch Squeaky sound for weeks or months. The way yours suddenly died is a usual indication of external case power supply to be at fault. I am sorry that your jumper patch didn't work but to be on the same page, did you use something like this kit
LINK
Scroll midway down the page and make sure if you have an IDE hard drive you have connected the power supply cable (Second row images) as otherwise your drive can not get power through other cable. WIth SATA its single cable as shown on third row images.

And you don't need this kid if you are handy and can open your desktop computer to add the removed non working external drive as a slave in your existing system. This is even better with faster bus connection and better power supply.
Many of times that classic gentle hit on the side of drive may return back life (Releasing that sticky HD's head) but I don't advise that.

Bottom line, its not the end of it and data as you say, is retrievable but then beware that retrieving companies work based on you need and feel for sensitivity of the lost data rather that the complex or easy nature of work needed. So never mention this is the only copy of your 18 years of images or something extremely important to you (At least before paying for the service). If having personal contact with them, mention you probably have other back ups but would not want to go through hassle of finding that, and you prefer to see this drive is retrieved in first place, provided the charges are not abnormally high. Geeks also have better sympathy when knowing this is only a part of personal home data and not a big companies data. So do you number and bargain. It can pay you big time. Funny thing is that when you really want to dispose your old hard drive and have no one access to the data on that, the procedure is so complicated to destroy that data. They say deleting by over writing, physical damage such as burning or even shooting at the drive, won't destroy the data. So your data though silent for now, seems very safe.
Best of luck and make sure to use back up (Even in more than one physical location than your current place) regularity in future.

Someone who has 18yrs. of data has no excuse for not having a backup in 2013...retrieval will be very costly if possible BTW.

Print them out. Sometimes the best backup is a hard copy. All backup drives will eventually die.

I used software called "getdataback" before and successfully recovered a drive full of files

http://www.runtime.org​/data-recovery-software.htm

Well, the HD is not FUBR. It shouldn't be too costly to have them recovered. Hope you got everything back.

Just got a call back about the drive. Apparently one of the heads did minor damage to the disk but they say they can recover most of the files. It's not cheap to say the least! The FAT got damage in the process hence no reading of he drive.

Maybe Pekka needs to teach the new AMASS forum that you aren't allowed online on the site without having spent time reading through a FAQ on backing up photos to multiple media and to multiple physical locations. Hard disks will break. Just like with a car, it's just a question of what mileage before something really bad will happen.

burnaz wrote in post #16558095
Just got a call back about the drive. Apparently one of the heads did minor damage to the disk but they say they can recover most of the files. It's not cheap to say the least! The FAT got damage in the process hence no reading of he drive.

One thing to note that an archival disk where new photos are added, but no photos are modified or removed, will have all individual photos stored consecutively. So no fragmentation. This means that a linear surface scan can detect the signature of a JPEG image and then continue to pick up sectors until it has enough data to extract the photo - and somewhere after the end of that photo will come either a new photo or maybe some directory information.

So when archiving multiple copies of photos to different disks, it's best to run some copy process that just adds any new photos since last synchronization but that doesn't do other changes to the disk. Then there can be 100% loss of the file indices and surface scans can still pick up the majority of images as long as the images is in a format that the surface scan code knows the signature patterns of.

I have two 250g USB external drives that mirror, but never touch one another. And never touch the master working drive except when backing up work. So, one goes, the other can recovery and make a new copy.

Also, you guys with your whole business (or family life) tied up in multiple albums, think about a solid-state BU drive. No moving parts ... not cheap, about twice what a regular HD costs, but how much is all that work worth? I have one SSHD, cost $190 for 250g ... so, not too out of line nowadays.

how about a collection of dated DVD's thats what I do. you can put a ton of Pix on DVD's

grayline wrote in post #16558824
how about a collection of dated DVD's thats what I do. you can put a ton of Pix on DVD's

Remember that a DVD also agaes. Some brands can even age very quickly. How often do you do a full read-back to verify the disks? And do you keep multiple copies of the disks - preferably using different brands?

monkey44 wrote in post #16558815
...Also, you guys with your whole business (or family life) tied up in multiple albums, think about a solid-state BU drive. No moving parts ... not cheap, about twice what a regular HD costs, but how much is all that work worth? I have one SSHD, cost $190 for 250g ... so, not too out of line nowadays.

Flash memory has its own issues when used as archival storage (fading, bit flipping). SSDs have their place, where the speed or physical ruggedness is needed, but for archival storage they offer no advantage (unless you beat up your archives ) and a couple of unique issues.

But, the main reason I replied is your statement that SSDs cost "about twice" the HD cost. Using your $190 250GB SSD for comparison, for the same $190 you can get a 4TB HD. My math says that is 16x the cost.

RTPVid wrote in post #16559546
Flash memory has its own issues when used as archival storage (fading, bit flipping). SSDs have their place, where the speed or physical ruggedness is needed, but for archival storage they offer no advantage (unless you beat up your archives ) and a couple of unique issues.

But, the main reason I replied is your statement that SSDs cost "about twice" the HD cost. Using your $190 250GB SSD for comparison, for the same $190 you can get a 4TB HD. My math says that is 16x the cost.

Okay... actually meaning 'a lot more or a lot less' depending on what you buy. My point mostly was it's relatively cheap to create back-up drives that will not lose your images.

I'd worry about DVD, and worry about flash drives, but worry less about HD or SSHD back-up and the price should not come into play much when you have your entire catalog - even family or work, or fun, whatever - the value is certainly worth the effort to save it more than once ... when you lose it, it's gone - done, over. No repeating the images - it's piece of history that will never appear again. So impossible to place a value on that ...

Some folks never do it until it's all gone once - then it's too late. not pushing anyone here, just trying to save a real downer for those that don't understand this subject.