Hard drive corrupt? About to lose files?

[Deleted User]

I've explained data recovery many times in my work situation and this is how I usually go about it:

1. Think of a hard disk as being like the encyclopaedia Britannica on your book shelf, thousands of pages of data in separate sections / chapters / volumes. The way you find anything is using the contents / index pages which direct you to the right volume, chapter, section, page etc.
   
   
2. In the above, you want to find the section about "zebras" and the index will tell you go to volume "Z" page 24 and you will find it. Problem with hard disks is they don't always organise the data contiguously or sequentially so the "zebra" section might start in volume "A" on page 56, run for 3 pages and then jump volume "G" page 156 for 10 pages and finally the last section in volume "O" page 98 for 3 pages.
   
   
3. There are also multiple levels of indexing and pointers to deal with - any of them can become corrupt or deleted:
   
   a) First problem is that computer needs to be told where the index is - it isn't on page 1 so there is a data entry pointing to the start of the index - something like saying line 56, character 25 on page 23 - if it is off by just one character the whole thing is corrupt.
   
   b) In the index there is a list of file names as part of the master index and where the file is located in logical terms - this will point sections / page numbers and the number of pages and note that the file can be scattered randomly in different locations.
   
   c) Page numbers don't point to a physical location on the disk, so there is another index which translates page numbers to an actual physical location so the hard disk can retrieve the actual data.
   
   
4. When it all goes wrong, there a two broad types of hard disk problem - physical or logical data problems. Logical means that your encyclopaedia is physically pristine but the words on the pages have become unreadable or jumbled up somehow. Physical problems mean the pages are missing or rotten.
   
   
5. Corruption can occur in many different ways and using the book analogy and the "Zebra" section, here are the types of data loss you can have - in many cases of physically failing hard disks, it will be a combination of all of them:
   
   a) Deleted files - in this case somebody has just put a pencil line through the index entry for "zebra" to mark it as deleted. The entry is still there but now ignored and the pages all about Zebra are still on this disk - that is until something else comes along and re-uses either the index entry line for a new file or the actual pages that the Zebra file occupies are re-used.
   
   Recovery involves erasing the pencil line through the zebra in the index and often works if nothing has reused the Zebra pages. 
    
   b) Pages that have become damaged and unreadable - usually through physical failure of the disk or an error occurring when writing the pages - eg sudden power loss. This might occur in the main part of the book, so say pages 40-50 become unreadable. This can affect multiple files so the section in the book about Zebra on page 46 will be unreadable along with "Cookies" on Page 42 and so on.
   
   File systems usually mark a full page of the book as unavailable if it contains errors, but bits of the page may still be readable. Recovery tools will repeatedly try to read pages 40-50 until they can by chance get something useful back from each page.
   
   c) Similar to the above but this time the index pages themselves become corrupt / unreadable - this is where is gets difficult. Without an index, you have no idea what files you are looking for. The OS which will refuse to read page 7 of the index because one line of it is corrupt but recovery tools will read all the other lines and try to reconstruct the index - you may then just lose a few lines of the index rather than the whole page containing a hundred entries. 
   
   Bear in mind the 3 levels on indexing mentioned above - any of those indexes can be subject to this problem.
   
   
6. You problem is likely to be the indexes. The whole encyclopaedia Britannica is still on your shelf but the index is either partially or totalling missing. So recovery tools are trying to piece together the index, anything it can get from the index is usually fairly likely to result in recovery unless you have corrupt pages all over the place.
   
   During the process of recovering the indexes, it will find both current and expired index entries and won't really know which are valid and clean.
   
   Once that is done, you will find that maybe 2 million of your 10 million pages have been matched to an index entry and those files have a good chance of being recovered intact.
   
   
7. So for the other 8 million pages on your disk, this is where the hard part starts. Some of them will be blank pages because your disk isn't full and some will contain data, but without an index, nobody knows so the only way is to scan every single page of your encyclopaedia - and this is what is in progress now.
   
   It involves guess work though, each page is just a bunch of numbers, but sometimes those numbers have recognisable patterns that indicate the start or end of a file. Photos contain header files detailing the type of file eg jpg and the size. If the recovery tool find that it might be able to assume pages 46-47 contain a photo of a Zebra. It won't know the file name so you will get it back as "00001.jpg" and so on.
   
   
8. "Top level" data recovery will involve inspecting pages by hand / eye to recover scraps of data that can be assumed to be part of a certain type of file and putting various pages together to see if they start to make sense.
   
   

You are currently doing step 5 of the above, there recovery software has reconstructed the index to the best of its ability and is now scanning the disk to ensure the pages that the indexes point to are readable, and if so you will be able to recover them. Not sure if Easus does step 6 as well at this point.

[Deleted User]

JustAnotherSaver said:

Not sure what you mean to a different drive. Whether you mean on to a 3rd drive? 
When the data is recovered, it should be sent directly to a 2nd drive, not kept on the corrupt drive.

Reason I say is for example, the D drive is knackered. Or rather it says 0 bad sectors but we have this issue.
Yes, well it might not be physically knackered but it is logically - think of the book analogy - all your pages might be still pristine paper but the ink has got smudged. Drive might be sound and re-usable by cleaning all the ink off and putting new words on it. If the drive is physically failing then it is like the paper on your pages crumbling or falling out of the book

I'm recovering to the E drive, so a new drive. 
Yes perfect

Not sure if you mean then to copy from E to say F or whether E is fine. 
No, as above

Either way I've selected a few video files and few image files and of the ones I've selected to open, they've all worked. Basically if they have a file size they have (so far) opened. If they're 0bytes then obviously they're worthless.
Yes all good.

** it actually says there's about 8.5TB recoverable on this 6TB drive. 
Yes this is typical - see my other comment, it has found lots of conflicting index entries for pages that are no longer current, until it scans your whole disk it won't know which ones are the most current - when it does it should discard the old index entries as unrecoverable.

There's a lot of 'lost folder' folders. Not sure what the content of these is yet. 
Yes, folders add an extra layer of complexity to the index because the index points itself to another index, but the files might still be recoverable, just won't be allocated to a particular folder now.

Just added the answers in bold above for speed.

JustAnotherSaver

Deleted_User said:

@JustAnotherSaver I've been away from the forum a week and just caught up on this thread, generally you are heading in the right direction now but you need a lot of patience with data recovery but I'll just make a few points that I don't see covered.

1. Can you confirm you are recovering files to a different drive and not trying to recover them to the original drive? Super important that the corrupt drive remains read only and you don't change anything on it.

Yes confirmed. Completely different physical drive.

2. There isn't a single do it all recovery tool that can save the day, depending on the type of corruption / loss of data and the data you are trying to recover, there are different tools with different approaches and success criteria. The professionals don't use Easus, Stella or Recuva but the tools they use are a bit more technical and complex from an end user view. 

R-Studio, GetDataBack, ReclaiMe, and DMDE are what professionals use. Filescavenger is useful in some scenarios, Photorec is a great free tool tuned for photo recovery.

Professionals will firstly evaluate what type of corruption they are dealing with before picking an appropriate tool and method. In your case the file index and allocation tables are the problem but the data is most likely intact.

I've just downloaded (downloaded probably wrong term. 'recovered') a folder which contained MANY sub folders which in turn contained MANY pictures & various videos.

There's no way I can scan through these in such a time frame but having a very quick pass through I would say of the images that have come through, 95%-99% APPEAR to be ok.

There are some images that have taken a hit and are at 0bytes but unless I've missed a chunk, I am very surprised how many images have made it through.

Videos on the other hand is a different matter. The success rate on recovering videos, not just movie .mkv files, is considerably lower - and it's not just limited to videos that are GB in size. Even some videos that I know were sub 100mb in size have taken a hit and now show as 0bytes.

I've checked out my audio folder too and it SEEMS to my amazement, much better than what I thought it was going to be.

I have so many files in there. So many. Of the ones that have made it through and show a file size, I've tested a few at random and they all play audio at the various points in the track I select.

There's maybe 30-50 tracks from what I can make out at the moment (sort by file size) that are dead (0bytes) but thankfully I think these are only YouTube rips where say a DJ has done an hour long mix & I've just used a website to convert to .mp3. Providing these videos are still on YouTube I can get these back.

I was really worried about my rare music files because if they were gone then they were gone, there would be literally no way in the world to re-get them. Thankfully I think those have come through ok, or at least they seem to have.

3. The files you recover may be corrupt, so don't rely on them until you have checked them all.

In what sense?

There's that many files that if I spent every second for the remainder of the year checking these things out I still wouldn't finish by Xmas.

BUT having said that, I've checked out a number of image, audio & video files. Of the ones I've checked that show a file size that appears correct (so say up to a few MB for an image, maybe 6-8MB for an audio file with some being much more than that if it's an hour long session, and various video files ranging from a few 100MB up to say 30GB for one file) - of those I tested, they all seemed to work fine.

The images would come up on screen as they should in the size/resolution they should.

The audio files I would skip through them at various random points and they would continue to play.

The video files I would do the same as the audio files and they would all play as they should.

It's when I open a video file (for example) that is a large file say, but not what you'd expect it to be, where it doesn't work. For example...

One of the Fast & Furious movies showing up as 400mb. Clearly wrong. Should be 20GB-30GB.

It begins to play as it should, but as I skip through it, if i go too far in to the movie it just goes back to the start ... BUT the file looked suspiciously wrong from the beginning due to the file size.

Point being - those where the file size looked correct have (so far) worked as they should.

4. Concentrate on the files that are irreplaceable, I note this is likely to be the photos. I wouldn't bother with the movies or even the music, there are sources for all of them, somebody somewhere in the world will have that movie / music album.

Done that. The photos have been downloaded. I wont call it recovered as that makes it sound like everything is ok.

You're right with the movies part of the videos. The movies were just a convenience. I can get them again. It's just a bit annoying & will cost a bit of money but they can be replaced as you say.

Some of the video files though are irreplaceable. Once gone, they're gone.

Some of the music is replaceable too but actually I own quite a lot of music where if it's gone & I have no backup then you'll have to trust me when I say, it's gone. These aren't files acquired from iTunes or Amazon or a CD where I can just return to source and get them again.

5. You need patience, can take weeks to do a good job of it. Unless the hard drive is physically dying (in which case you need to clone immediately) then the data isn't going anywhere and you need to approach this with a long term mindset rather than trying to get everything back by breakfast tomorrow.

Is what I was thinking.

I'm going to get back what's important right now.

I'm then going to buy a 'cheap' enough equal capacity drive (even though this duff one is a 6TB Seagate Ironwolf 7200) and clone it.

I'm not sure with the previous suggestion of playing with Linux. I don't know what I'm doing with that & therefore I think that's a recipe for disaster.

I do however have Acronis True Image 2019 (paid for - legit) which I found out yesterday does cloning.

I was told to do 'sector-by-sector' cloning but I don't see that mentioned in there. I see "as is" mentioned though.

6. You touched on a relevant topic earlier, how do the likes of the forensics and "top level" recover data that nobody else can - time is a massive factor. End users want tools they can do a few click and come back later to a list of files that may be recovered. If a million pound criminal case depends on data from a disk then a professional team can inspect data by hand / eye and recognise patterns and reconstruct files block by block.

Thanks. I suspected as much.

The EaseUS guy who accessed my PC remotely (not sure if I mentioned this earlier) - he dropped "WinHex" on my desktop and accessed files through it.

This Stellar software took forever & a day to scan but this guy using WinHex was able to pull up files that were 'lost' in a matter of minutes.

I don't know whether "WinHex" is more 'in depth' & better than these recovery programs or whether it just gets the same end result via a different process.
... I'll post something else next to help you understand what you are facing and how you will achieve it.

Responded in bold.

Out of interest, the software you mentioned, what's the difference between Stellar, EaseUS, Recuva etc and what the professionals use?

I suspect it's that what I'm using has a nice GUI, easy to see what you're doing, whereas what the pros use will look like how that WinHex did - with loads of random numbers and letters over the screen.

The real question though, is if this Stellar software gets me say 90% of what I lost, do these professional programs get me the other 10%? Or 1-9% of the other 10% even?

[Deleted User]

JustAnotherSaver said:

Deleted_User said:

@JustAnotherSaver I've been away from the forum a week and just caught up on this thread, generally you are heading in the right direction now but you need a lot of patience with data recovery but I'll just make a few points that I don't see covered.

1. Can you confirm you are recovering files to a different drive and not trying to recover them to the original drive? Super important that the corrupt drive remains read only and you don't change anything on it.

Yes confirmed. Completely different physical drive.

2. There isn't a single do it all recovery tool that can save the day, depending on the type of corruption / loss of data and the data you are trying to recover, there are different tools with different approaches and success criteria. The professionals don't use Easus, Stella or Recuva but the tools they use are a bit more technical and complex from an end user view. 

R-Studio, GetDataBack, ReclaiMe, and DMDE are what professionals use. Filescavenger is useful in some scenarios, Photorec is a great free tool tuned for photo recovery.

Professionals will firstly evaluate what type of corruption they are dealing with before picking an appropriate tool and method. In your case the file index and allocation tables are the problem but the data is most likely intact.

I've just downloaded (downloaded probably wrong term. 'recovered') a folder which contained MANY sub folders which in turn contained MANY pictures & various videos.

There's no way I can scan through these in such a time frame but having a very quick pass through I would say of the images that have come through, 95%-99% APPEAR to be ok.

There are some images that have taken a hit and are at 0bytes but unless I've missed a chunk, I am very surprised how many images have made it through.

Videos on the other hand is a different matter. The success rate on recovering videos, not just movie .mkv files, is considerably lower - and it's not just limited to videos that are GB in size. Even some videos that I know were sub 100mb in size have taken a hit and now show as 0bytes.

I've checked out my audio folder too and it SEEMS to my amazement, much better than what I thought it was going to be.

I have so many files in there. So many. Of the ones that have made it through and show a file size, I've tested a few at random and they all play audio at the various points in the track I select.

There's maybe 30-50 tracks from what I can make out at the moment (sort by file size) that are dead (0bytes) but thankfully I think these are only YouTube rips where say a DJ has done an hour long mix & I've just used a website to convert to .mp3. Providing these videos are still on YouTube I can get these back.

I was really worried about my rare music files because if they were gone then they were gone, there would be literally no way in the world to re-get them. Thankfully I think those have come through ok, or at least they seem to have.

3. The files you recover may be corrupt, so don't rely on them until you have checked them all.

In what sense?

There's that many files that if I spent every second for the remainder of the year checking these things out I still wouldn't finish by Xmas.

BUT having said that, I've checked out a number of image, audio & video files. Of the ones I've checked that show a file size that appears correct (so say up to a few MB for an image, maybe 6-8MB for an audio file with some being much more than that if it's an hour long session, and various video files ranging from a few 100MB up to say 30GB for one file) - of those I tested, they all seemed to work fine.

The images would come up on screen as they should in the size/resolution they should.

The audio files I would skip through them at various random points and they would continue to play.

The video files I would do the same as the audio files and they would all play as they should.

It's when I open a video file (for example) that is a large file say, but not what you'd expect it to be, where it doesn't work. For example...

One of the Fast & Furious movies showing up as 400mb. Clearly wrong. Should be 20GB-30GB.

It begins to play as it should, but as I skip through it, if i go too far in to the movie it just goes back to the start ... BUT the file looked suspiciously wrong from the beginning due to the file size.

Point being - those where the file size looked correct have (so far) worked as they should.

4. Concentrate on the files that are irreplaceable, I note this is likely to be the photos. I wouldn't bother with the movies or even the music, there are sources for all of them, somebody somewhere in the world will have that movie / music album.

Done that. The photos have been downloaded. I wont call it recovered as that makes it sound like everything is ok.

You're right with the movies part of the videos. The movies were just a convenience. I can get them again. It's just a bit annoying & will cost a bit of money but they can be replaced as you say.

Some of the video files though are irreplaceable. Once gone, they're gone.

Some of the music is replaceable too but actually I own quite a lot of music where if it's gone & I have no backup then you'll have to trust me when I say, it's gone. These aren't files acquired from iTunes or Amazon or a CD where I can just return to source and get them again.

5. You need patience, can take weeks to do a good job of it. Unless the hard drive is physically dying (in which case you need to clone immediately) then the data isn't going anywhere and you need to approach this with a long term mindset rather than trying to get everything back by breakfast tomorrow.

Is what I was thinking.

I'm going to get back what's important right now.

I'm then going to buy a 'cheap' enough equal capacity drive (even though this duff one is a 6TB Seagate Ironwolf 7200) and clone it.

I'm not sure with the previous suggestion of playing with Linux. I don't know what I'm doing with that & therefore I think that's a recipe for disaster.

I do however have Acronis True Image 2019 (paid for - legit) which I found out yesterday does cloning.

I was told to do 'sector-by-sector' cloning but I don't see that mentioned in there. I see "as is" mentioned though.

6. You touched on a relevant topic earlier, how do the likes of the forensics and "top level" recover data that nobody else can - time is a massive factor. End users want tools they can do a few click and come back later to a list of files that may be recovered. If a million pound criminal case depends on data from a disk then a professional team can inspect data by hand / eye and recognise patterns and reconstruct files block by block.

Thanks. I suspected as much.

The EaseUS guy who accessed my PC remotely (not sure if I mentioned this earlier) - he dropped "WinHex" on my desktop and accessed files through it.

This Stellar software took forever & a day to scan but this guy using WinHex was able to pull up files that were 'lost' in a matter of minutes.

I don't know whether "WinHex" is more 'in depth' & better than these recovery programs or whether it just gets the same end result via a different process.
... I'll post something else next to help you understand what you are facing and how you will achieve it.

Responded in bold.

Out of interest, the software you mentioned, what's the difference between Stellar, EaseUS, Recuva etc and what the professionals use?

I suspect it's that what I'm using has a nice GUI, easy to see what you're doing, whereas what the pros use will look like how that WinHex did - with loads of random numbers and letters over the screen.

The real question though, is if this Stellar software gets me say 90% of what I lost, do these professional programs get me the other 10%? Or 1-9% of the other 10% even?

JustAnotherSaver said:

Deleted_User said:

@JustAnotherSaver I've been away from the forum a week and just caught up on this thread, generally you are heading in the right direction now but you need a lot of patience with data recovery but I'll just make a few points that I don't see covered.

1. Can you confirm you are recovering files to a different drive and not trying to recover them to the original drive? Super important that the corrupt drive remains read only and you don't change anything on it.

Yes confirmed. Completely different physical drive.

2. There isn't a single do it all recovery tool that can save the day, depending on the type of corruption / loss of data and the data you are trying to recover, there are different tools with different approaches and success criteria. The professionals don't use Easus, Stella or Recuva but the tools they use are a bit more technical and complex from an end user view. 

R-Studio, GetDataBack, ReclaiMe, and DMDE are what professionals use. Filescavenger is useful in some scenarios, Photorec is a great free tool tuned for photo recovery.

Professionals will firstly evaluate what type of corruption they are dealing with before picking an appropriate tool and method. In your case the file index and allocation tables are the problem but the data is most likely intact.

I've just downloaded (downloaded probably wrong term. 'recovered') a folder which contained MANY sub folders which in turn contained MANY pictures & various videos.

There's no way I can scan through these in such a time frame but having a very quick pass through I would say of the images that have come through, 95%-99% APPEAR to be ok.

There are some images that have taken a hit and are at 0bytes but unless I've missed a chunk, I am very surprised how many images have made it through.

Videos on the other hand is a different matter. The success rate on recovering videos, not just movie .mkv files, is considerably lower - and it's not just limited to videos that are GB in size. Even some videos that I know were sub 100mb in size have taken a hit and now show as 0bytes.

I've checked out my audio folder too and it SEEMS to my amazement, much better than what I thought it was going to be.

I have so many files in there. So many. Of the ones that have made it through and show a file size, I've tested a few at random and they all play audio at the various points in the track I select.

There's maybe 30-50 tracks from what I can make out at the moment (sort by file size) that are dead (0bytes) but thankfully I think these are only YouTube rips where say a DJ has done an hour long mix & I've just used a website to convert to .mp3. Providing these videos are still on YouTube I can get these back.

I was really worried about my rare music files because if they were gone then they were gone, there would be literally no way in the world to re-get them. Thankfully I think those have come through ok, or at least they seem to have.

3. The files you recover may be corrupt, so don't rely on them until you have checked them all.

In what sense?

There's that many files that if I spent every second for the remainder of the year checking these things out I still wouldn't finish by Xmas.

BUT having said that, I've checked out a number of image, audio & video files. Of the ones I've checked that show a file size that appears correct (so say up to a few MB for an image, maybe 6-8MB for an audio file with some being much more than that if it's an hour long session, and various video files ranging from a few 100MB up to say 30GB for one file) - of those I tested, they all seemed to work fine.

The images would come up on screen as they should in the size/resolution they should.

The audio files I would skip through them at various random points and they would continue to play.

The video files I would do the same as the audio files and they would all play as they should.

It's when I open a video file (for example) that is a large file say, but not what you'd expect it to be, where it doesn't work. For example...

One of the Fast & Furious movies showing up as 400mb. Clearly wrong. Should be 20GB-30GB.

It begins to play as it should, but as I skip through it, if i go too far in to the movie it just goes back to the start ... BUT the file looked suspiciously wrong from the beginning due to the file size.

Point being - those where the file size looked correct have (so far) worked as they should.

4. Concentrate on the files that are irreplaceable, I note this is likely to be the photos. I wouldn't bother with the movies or even the music, there are sources for all of them, somebody somewhere in the world will have that movie / music album.

Done that. The photos have been downloaded. I wont call it recovered as that makes it sound like everything is ok.

You're right with the movies part of the videos. The movies were just a convenience. I can get them again. It's just a bit annoying & will cost a bit of money but they can be replaced as you say.

Some of the video files though are irreplaceable. Once gone, they're gone.

Some of the music is replaceable too but actually I own quite a lot of music where if it's gone & I have no backup then you'll have to trust me when I say, it's gone. These aren't files acquired from iTunes or Amazon or a CD where I can just return to source and get them again.

5. You need patience, can take weeks to do a good job of it. Unless the hard drive is physically dying (in which case you need to clone immediately) then the data isn't going anywhere and you need to approach this with a long term mindset rather than trying to get everything back by breakfast tomorrow.

Is what I was thinking.

I'm going to get back what's important right now.

I'm then going to buy a 'cheap' enough equal capacity drive (even though this duff one is a 6TB Seagate Ironwolf 7200) and clone it.

I'm not sure with the previous suggestion of playing with Linux. I don't know what I'm doing with that & therefore I think that's a recipe for disaster.

I do however have Acronis True Image 2019 (paid for - legit) which I found out yesterday does cloning.

I was told to do 'sector-by-sector' cloning but I don't see that mentioned in there. I see "as is" mentioned though.

6. You touched on a relevant topic earlier, how do the likes of the forensics and "top level" recover data that nobody else can - time is a massive factor. End users want tools they can do a few click and come back later to a list of files that may be recovered. If a million pound criminal case depends on data from a disk then a professional team can inspect data by hand / eye and recognise patterns and reconstruct files block by block.

Thanks. I suspected as much.

The EaseUS guy who accessed my PC remotely (not sure if I mentioned this earlier) - he dropped "WinHex" on my desktop and accessed files through it.

This Stellar software took forever & a day to scan but this guy using WinHex was able to pull up files that were 'lost' in a matter of minutes.

I don't know whether "WinHex" is more 'in depth' & better than these recovery programs or whether it just gets the same end result via a different process.
... I'll post something else next to help you understand what you are facing and how you will achieve it.

Responded in bold.

Out of interest, the software you mentioned, what's the difference between Stellar, EaseUS, Recuva etc and what the professionals use?

I suspect it's that what I'm using has a nice GUI, easy to see what you're doing, whereas what the pros use will look like how that WinHex did - with loads of random numbers and letters over the screen.

The real question though, is if this Stellar software gets me say 90% of what I lost, do these professional programs get me the other 10%? Or 1-9% of the other 10% even?

1. Good to see what looks like a relatively high success rate. Smaller files may have a better success rate because they are more likely to have been written in one contiguous block and not scattered around different places. Other than that, it will be random as to what you get and don't get depending on how the disk has been corrupted.
   
   
2. Yes you might not be able to know a file is corrupted unless to test the whole file by playing or watching it in full so you might never know until years down the line that just 1 bit in a billion has flipped from 1 to 0 and everything from that point in the audio / video is not computable, on the other hand, you might just get a glitch on the playback and hardly notice.
   
   
3. Cloning - essential when the corrupt disk is on its last legs, gives you more time and attempts to recover the data - if you suspect that is the case, stop all recovery attempts now until you have a clone.
   
   
4. Win Hex - yes a great tool, but going back to the Encyclopaedia analogy it is useful if your are familiar with the original book and read it many times because you will recognise certain pages of the book using WinHex and be able to instantly pick things out - great tool for 2nd stage recovery for the files that don't get recovered in the first passes.
   
   
5. Nobody can answer whether you will ever get 1% or 9% of the remaining 10% in terms of recovery. It will be a case of diminishing returns in terms of time and effort vs results. It will also depending on the type of corruption - has the page in the book literally turned to dust or is the ink just smudged a bit. In the case of corrupt indexes but good data, are the start end ends of the chapter easy to find on the disk - all depends on the type of file and how fragmented it is. 

You are doing a good job so far, just take it slowly and patiently to avoid making things worse. Think of this as doing multiple passes each with different results, get the bulk done in the first pass and then progressively work towards the more difficult files as time goes on.

If you grab a clone of the disk there is nothing stopping you coming back to the task in 6 months time with a fresh mind, less panic and more knowledge.

Oh - and backup those recovered files immediately to a different physical disk / media that is separate from your PC please. 

[Deleted User]

JustAnotherSaver said:

Out of interest, the software you mentioned, what's the difference between Stellar, EaseUS, Recuva etc and what the professionals use?

This needed a separate comment because it is a bit off topic.

Stellar, EaseUS and Recuva spend most of their time and money on marketing, fancy website and making sure you stumble across their product when you are desperately Googling for data recovery software. The software will be mostly automated and easy for non-technical users. A large slice of the budget also goes on tech support for people that have no idea what they are doing.

Proper data recovery software companies spend their time and money working with data recovery specialists that actually use their software and provide feedback to improve the product. You won't find them at the top of the search results with a fancy website, the user interface won't be fancy, the software will be more difficult to use, technical support will be pitched at professionals and hard to understand. But the end results will be much better.

And this explains why data recovery specialists charge so much money - you can't get to that skill level overnight or buy a magic software solution that does it all in a few clicks.

So from your perspective, depends on how valuable this data is, DIY method is cheap, fast, cheerful and will yield basic results, professional services will cost you much more but yield better results.

However:

R-Studio - $80
GetbackData $79
ReclaiMe - $79
DMDE £16-£75

Isn't that expensive for individual licences.

JustAnotherSaver

Good to see what looks like a relatively high success rate. Smaller files may have a better success rate because they are more likely to have been written in one contiguous block and not scattered around different places. Other than that, it will be random as to what you get and don't get depending on how the disk has been corrupted.

Yes you might not be able to know a file is corrupted unless to test the whole file by playing or watching it in full so you might never know until years down the line that just 1 bit in a billion has flipped from 1 to 0 and everything from that point in the audio / video is not computable, on the other hand, you might just get a glitch on the playback and hardly notice.

I scanned some files last night (not literally scanned, just went through) and some where obviously duff but others appeared like they may be ok. Video files which actually had a file size other than 0bytes.

When opening them, it just displayed an image from a picture from another file totally unrelated to what the content of the video was.

This will be the kind of thing you were referring to. It's happened to a lot of video files but thankfully it seems that the folder it's happened in - is not really so important to me.

If you grab a clone of the disk there is nothing stopping you coming back to the task in 6 months time with a fresh mind, less panic and more knowledge.

Drive 'should' be arriving tomorrow. I hope Amazon don't deliver it the way they delivered my last item & one a few before that (think shot put / discuss throwing).

Only thing is it's a Seagate 6TB 5400rpm. I don't particularly like buying 5400rpm. I don't know how much slower than 7200rpm they are in 'real world' terms but I always try to buy 7200rpm drives when possible ... but this was an unexpected purchase & I've literally only bought it to clone this drive.

Once I'm done-done, I guess it'll just serve as a spare drive.

I've now downloaded (still not referring to it as recovered) all the files Stellar can find & I'm on to the last bits - the "Lost Folder" and "found.000". I don't know if they're any good but I'll download them all the same purely based on how long Stellar took - and then I can go through them at a later date. I went through a few random folders. Some contained valuable files, BUT I'm not sure if these were files temporarily brought over from another drive (therefore I still have them on the other drive) or whether they're files from this drive that have been recovered - but instead of where they should be, they're recovered in a 'lost folder'.

I'll give you an example...

A folder on this PC contains (contained) video files which Plex accesses. I don't have enough space on this drive to house ALL my movies through - some are stored on an external 8TB drive. Let's say I fancy watching a movie that's stored on that 8TB external.

Now until I get a home storage setup set up properly (currently pricing up NAS enclosures to make a start on that) what I do is grab that external drive, COPY the movie to the Plex folder on my PC & watch the movie.

Once done I then delete it from the Plex folder on the PC. It remains on the external 8TB.

So what I'm saying is - in this "lost folder" folder that's been created on Stellar, some of the sub folders contain movie files, but I need to cross reference whether they originated from the PC Plex folder or are they files I copied from the 8TB external drive (in which case I already have them).

Oh - and backup those recovered files immediately to a different physical disk / media that is separate from your PC please.

One of the reasons I'm about to pull the trigger on a NAS.

I just need to pick one.

Ideally speaking I would like a 4bay NAS minimum, BUT that costs and I wasn't planning on buying one yet.

So I'm now looking at 2bay NAS enclosures to get me up & running.

I had been looking at some in and around the £200 range +/- around £20.

However a guy has pointed me in the direction of the Synology DS220+ over the ones I was looking at based on what I would like from it, if I can stretch that far.

JustAnotherSaver

[Deleted User] said:

JustAnotherSaver said:

Out of interest, the software you mentioned, what's the difference between Stellar, EaseUS, Recuva etc and what the professionals use?

This needed a separate comment because it is a bit off topic.

Stellar, EaseUS and Recuva spend most of their time and money on marketing, fancy website and making sure you stumble across their product when you are desperately Googling for data recovery software. The software will be mostly automated and easy for non-technical users. A large slice of the budget also goes on tech support for people that have no idea what they are doing.

Proper data recovery software companies spend their time and money working with data recovery specialists that actually use their software and provide feedback to improve the product. You won't find them at the top of the search results with a fancy website, the user interface won't be fancy, the software will be more difficult to use, technical support will be pitched at professionals and hard to understand. But the end results will be much better.

And this explains why data recovery specialists charge so much money - you can't get to that skill level overnight or buy a magic software solution that does it all in a few clicks.

So from your perspective, depends on how valuable this data is, DIY method is cheap, fast, cheerful and will yield basic results, professional services will cost you much more but yield better results.

However:

R-Studio - $80
GetbackData $79
ReclaiMe - $79
DMDE £16-£75

Isn't that expensive for individual licences.

Makes absolute sense to me. Thanks.

I think Stellar cost me about £80-£90.

As I say, Recuva may well have got me the exact same result for free. I don't know but more importantly I was in a situation where I didn't actually care. I just wanted my stuff back.

Stellar was the program that I chose to run purely based on a Google search & reading 3-4 articles recommending various software. It didn't always come out on top in every article but on the balance it was the one I chose to go for.

Then when the result came through that it had found most of the files (& took about 48 hours to do so!) I decided I'm not really wanting to go through another 48 hour scan with Recuva when it may not even 'find' as many files. It may have found more, or the same, or less, who knows but like I said, at that point I no longer cared, so just paid up.

[Deleted User]

JustAnotherSaver said:

Then when the result came through that it had found most of the files (& took about 48 hours to do so!) I decided I'm not really wanting to go through another 48 hour scan with Recuva when it may not even 'find' as many files. It may have found more, or the same, or less, who knows but like I said, at that point I no longer cared, so just paid up.

Try not to rush all this, if it takes 10x 48 hour scans to get all your files back then so be it, this is a task that requires patience.

It will give you the chance to reorganise all you files as well and clean up anything that isn't needed.

If you don't relish the thought of opening thousands of files to check, rename and organise, then break it down in to chunks, few hours a week, might take 6 months but you will get there.

Keep us all updated, the trauma and stress of all this will soon be in the past, but it is important that many people read this thread as there are some good pointers in it for recovery techniques and above all else, might prompt somebody to take a backup before it is too late.

debitcardmayhem

Deleted_User said:

Keep us all updated, the trauma and stress of all this will soon be in the past, but it is important that many people read this thread as there are some good pointers in it for recovery techniques and above all else, might prompt somebody to take a backup before it is too late.

Alas my friend there are many threads that prove otherwise. However your points are valid and the OP will do well to take their time.

JustAnotherSaver

[Deleted User] said:

Try not to rush all this, if it takes 10x 48 hour scans to get all your files back then so be it, this is a task that requires patience.

I had none initially because everything had gone so I wanted as much back as possible as soon as possible. As we've discussed via PM and I think possibly in this thread too - I've got back perhaps 90%. I don't know for sure if it's actually about that but it feels about that as I go folder to folder.

Everything that looks duff, IS duff

Everything that looks good, so far, IS good.

Then there's that mixed up folder or so as I told you (again, possibly via PM) where say the cat video has been renamed dog video but it's actually the cat video.

Then on top of that, there's the say hamster video that's been renamed KJHGARSEKIJFHDKJDJHFGWUEGEWFHEWJK.

And lots of those two cases too.

But I'm at a stage now where I've got a fair old chunk back so NOW I can be calmer. 

Hard drive due tomorrow - that's when this problem drive gets cloned.

External drive due Wednesday - that's when & where anything worth anything gets copied.

And then as I mentioned to you, I'm really considering a NAS. In fact I'm not considering it, I'm getting one. It's just a case of which one. Probably the DS220+ at the moment.

In the long run probably not the cheapest way to do things, but unless the PC blows up in a moment, I'll not be having this happen again.

[Deleted User] said:

If you don't relish the thought of opening thousands of files to check, rename and organise, then break it down in to chunks, few hours a week, might take 6 months but you will get there.

Keep us all updated, the trauma and stress of all this will soon be in the past, but it is important that many people read this thread as there are some good pointers in it for recovery techniques and above all else, might prompt somebody to take a backup before it is too late.

Exactly what I plan on doing. I've got too much else to do & I'm already behind because of this.

Unfortunately a lot of the 'lost folder' files etc. seem to be nothing files. Like when you back up an iPhone and get a thousand folders all with just nothing really worth anything - but when you put them together as you restore via iTunes or iMazing then they actually make something.

And your end comment, you're spot on. I'd read (recently too) of people having problems with lost files, should've backed up etc. & I thought yeah I should do that too, I've backed ABC up but that was a long time ago & it's changed and I haven't got a backup of XYZ. I'll do it later ... later ... later.

Then when I actually bought the hard drive & was set to do it within a matter of days ... too late. I'd had ample time & just procrastinated too long. My own fault.

As bad as it is, it could've been worse. Suppose that's the only way I can look at it.