Is it game over for my digital past?

[BraveNewMalden]

Hello there. A couple of years ago I put all my photos on an external hard drive to free up space on my iMac. I'm not sure if I actually needed to do this, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I put the EHD in a drawer and didn't touch it again until yesterday, when I plugged it in and this message popped up.

Oh dear. Still, it said I can still copy the files. But when I double-clicked, and after a long time, the folder showed no photos. There was nothing there to either open or copy.

Is this a terminal event or might there be a way of salvaging my past? Any advice gratefully received, but please bear in mind that I can't do code as I am hundreds of years old.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Just thinking out loud, could you clone the drive to a known 'good' disk.

 

[BraveNewMalden]

Just thinking out loud, could you clone the drive to a known 'good' disk.

Is that easy to do? Plug two EHDs in and copy one to the other? Worth a try!

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper they are both free to usee apps.

 

[Peter Aretin]

I don't know what could be causing your problem, but it's probably worth trying DiskWarrior. I had a disk become inoperative and was able to recover the files from it, although it had to run for a very long time.

 

[BraveNewMalden]

Thank you. I tried yesterday with something called M3 Data Recovery and it got as far as establishing that, yes, there are photos on the drive and here are some thumbnails, but that's as far as it went. Maybe Disk Warrior will be smarter/stronger/more patient.

 

[Peter Aretin]

I think it took about two days, but I did recover the files. Good luck. I had another recovery application called StellarPhoenix, which has the worst tech support I've ever encountered. Avoid it like the plague.

 

[BraveNewMalden]

I think it took about two days, but I did recover the files. Good luck. I had another recovery application called StellarPhoenix, which has the worst tech support I've ever encountered. Avoid it like the plague.

Just to confirm, Disk Warrior costs around £115 from Amazon?

 

[Peter Aretin]

Apparently, V 5.2 costs about 129 USD. I actually bought it some time ago, and already had the CD, I discovered. I'm pretty confident it will recover your files, but it is also useful for rebuilding the directory structure of discs from time to time. One caveat about recovered image files. They may not open, as was the case with some recovered with the aforementioned StellarPhoenix. This may be due to having lost the .jpg, .tif, etc., extension and they can sometimes be made to work by adding it back onto the file name, even if you have to guess. Disk failure is pretty infrequent, but I've decided storage is relatively cheap and there's no such thing as too many redundant backups for important files.

 

[Sprocket]

Apparently, V 5.2 costs about 129 USD. I actually bought it some time ago, and already had the CD, I discovered. I'm pretty confident it will recover your files, but it is also useful for rebuilding the directory structure of discs from time to time. One caveat about recovered image files. They may not open, as was the case with some recovered with the aforementioned StellarPhoenix. This may be due to having lost the .jpg, .tif, etc., extension and they can sometimes be made to work by adding it back onto the file name, even if you have to guess. Disk failure is pretty infrequent, but I've decided storage is relatively cheap and there's no such thing as too many redundant backups for important files.

Hello there. A couple of years ago I put all my photos on an external hard drive to free up space on my iMac. I'm not sure if I actually needed to do this, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I put the EHD in a drawer and didn't touch it again until yesterday, when I plugged it in and this message popped up.

Oh dear. Still, it said I can still copy the files. But when I double-clicked, and after a long time, the folder showed no photos. There was nothing there to either open or copy.

Is this a terminal event or might there be a way of salvaging my past? Any advice gratefully received, but please bear in mind that I can't do code as I am hundreds of years old.

How is the disk formatted? Have you tried a different computer?

 

[BraveNewMalden]

How is the disk formatted? Have you tried a different computer?

I can't tell you about the formatting as I don't know how to find out that sort of thing. But I do have a MacBook I could try it on. Might that help, do you think?

 

[Sprocket]

I can't tell you about the formatting as I don't know how to find out that sort of thing. But I do have a MacBook I could try it on. Might that help, do you think?

Does the disk show up in finder when it is plugged in? I’m assuming it connects USB. If it is formatted in FAT32, any other computer should be able to read it. If you have access to a computer with Linux installed, Linux has built in tools to try and recover data. I’m also assuming it is a spinning disk and not an SSD. If the platters are damaged it is going to be very difficult, but if you have been able to see that photos are written to it, it is highly unlikely that it is damaged. It appears that it has become corrupted in some way. When you plug it in to your laptop, when you seen the icon for the disk, right click on it and go to “Properties”. That will have information on how the disk is formatted. Mac OS and Linux have SOME similarities (they are both derived from UNIX) but they are not compatible. I’m not an expert on the Mac OS but data recovery will be similar across all OS’s.