All is Lost

Here's a bummer... My 3.0 TB hard drive just took a dump on me last night. It has/had ALL of my photos on it. ߘ It's my backup drive that I only turn on when I go to backup photos. I turned it on last night to backup my photos and it told me that the drive needs to be formatted. WhY do I do? I tried to run chkdsk on it bit it says it can't do that on a RAW drive? Never seen that before. I thought because it was an external drive It couldn't run chkdsk. So I put it into my machine this morning and I get the same error.

Are all of my photos gone in cyberspace? Can I rebuild the partition table and the folder tree?

Is it a western digital drive?

1) First thing Id try is putting it on someone else's PC
2) It might be that your table is lost or corrupted but there is software to fix this without formatting or data loss, check the manufacters site for software
3) If its not under warranty take the drive out of the case and connect it directly to you motherboard sata port.
4) Data recovery companies can usually recover the data......but its usually costly
5) Consider using a cloud service to backup your backups in the future

Most backup software is iffy, its prefered to make manual backups

erm... you say it's your backup drive so it shouldnt be an issue as it means you have the original files still. With hardware being so cheap now i would just cut your losses, buy a new drive and create a new backup

FerozeK wrote in post #17514437
Is it a western digital drive?

1) First thing Id try is putting it on someone else's PC
2) It might be that your table is lost or corrupted but there is software to fix this without formatting or data loss, check the manufacters site for software
3) If its not under warranty take the drive out of the case and connect it directly to you motherboard sata port.
4) Data recovery companies can usually recover the data......but its usually costly
5) Consider using a cloud service to backup your backups in the future

Most backup software is iffy, its preferred to make manual backups

1) I put it in a different machine and got that RAW error message (same as it being inside the case it came in)
2) I will check the Seagate site and see if they have something that will repair the table
3) Done that before I moved it to the other computer.
4) This I know. I used to do this with Data recovery software that is now outdated and it will probably look at this 3 TB drive and go WTF!
5) I'm seriously considering this for the future.

It is a Seagate drive. Out of warranty since it was pulled from an OEM external case. (my bad)

I am off to the Seagate website to see if I can find data recovery software for their drives.

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #17514447
erm... you say it's your backup drive so it shouldnt be an issue as it means you have the original files still. With hardware being so cheap now i would just cut your losses, buy a new drive and create a new backup

This^^^ - Just get a new/replacement backup drive and make a new copy of all your files from your PC/MAC. Drives fail sometimes, which is why you have backups, It's just that your backup has failed rather than your main/working drive.

I have files from 2011 on my PC. It was not a redundant backup as it had stuff from my first digital camera 2002 and all of my scanned negatives. The only time I plugged this drive in and turned it on was for backing up photos (hence backup drive).

I've used this software in the past to recover a harddrive full of data I didn't back up https://www.runtime.or​g/data-recovery-software.htm

Thanks Eddie! I'm using the Seagate Recovery program now. If that doesn't work I'll try that one.

I've heard putting the drive in the freezer for a time can help. That didn't work for me on a failing drive.

I've actually done the drive freezing before with a drive that was ticking loudly. It worked for about 30 minutes so I was able to save the data on it. This is different. I'm hoping it's just a bad fat table that I can fix easily.

I had a similar situation and used Mini Tool Data Recovery after trying several other programs. http://www.minitool.co​m/data-recovery.html

I has to fool around with it a bit but it found everything in the original file structure. Many data recovery programs will give you all the files but not the directory structure from what I understand.

Good luck, hope it works out for you.

Noting here: It's not a backup unless you have multiple copies stored in different locations... All hard drives die eventually

Crashplan.....

I mean, what if you got robbed? Fire? Tornado? All gone, even if you have backups. Crashplan is unlimited storage, it does take a very long time to do that initial backup, but the incrementals aren't bad after that.

xpfloyd wrote in post #17514496
I've used this software in the past to recover a harddrive full of data I didn't back up https://www.runtime.or​g/data-recovery-software.htm

Ditto.

Also, hard drives are cheap. Keep multiple copies. without that, you do not HAVE a back up.

Lesson learned... again... I used to backup to DVDs I still have backups to 2007 but I was fearing that DVD's wont be readable soon like all of the CD's I created back when I had a BBS in the late 80's. None of those were readable after 15 years so I ended up pitching them. Nothing but old shareware stuff on them anyway but it was nice to have. I miss the DOS version of Tank.