External HDD help needed

[ryry92]

Seagate 2.0TB USB 2.0 I believe ... never had any problems with it - till today. It was plugged into the desktop and I was literally just renaming some of the folders on it, I turned around and caught the ac cable

YANK bloody fell on the floor (from knee height) I checked to see if there was any external damage - nope. The window on the desktop had turned opaque and froze. Closed it, pulled usb out and then reconnected.

Turns out the pc has now changed the hdd name from "SEAGATE 2TB HDD" to " Local Disk (K " checked disk management and the file system has changed from NTFS to RAW?

It keeps asking me to format the drive but I don't want to incase it permanently deletes the 1.4 TB of music, photos and film I have on it

Can anyone help?

Ry

[ryry92]

P.S I'm on windows xp (Yea I know lol)

[sideways14a]

Sounds like its screwed the filing system when you dropped it during an operation.
If i were you i would prepare yourself for a possible loss of 1.4 Tb of music

[Zeldoz]

Sounds like its screwed the filing system when you dropped it during an operation.
If i were you i would prepare yourself for a possible loss of 1.4 Tb of music

I would seriously want to break things.

[sideways14a]

I would seriously want to break things.

Thats what a NAS is for along with backed up cloud storage, keeping that amount of important data on an external unit without backups is just mental. But then i am seeing similar once a week thesedays, its common for folk to come to my office pleading with us to try and recover the 2000 pictures of there kids they have only stored on usb key or laptop!!

There are file recovery apps that "might" manage to do something with this, but... well lets say short of sending it away for a costly recover it could end in tears.

[ryry92]

I heavily contemplated smashing the shit out of it this morning Then I took a moment... went for a fag and came back.

I had around 500 films, 270 tv episodes, 24 thousand songs (Ironically this was my back up for my iTunes) and 3000 photos nearly. Luckily I have around 500GB backed up to my ps3. But it's from like a year ago. Took me 4 years to build this collection lol.

I will look into investing into a NAS now, VERY Pissed lol. I think I need to do some more research on it first as I don't fully understand the NAS system/how it works/which is best for me.

Sideways - Is it worth keeping hold of the HDD incase I can get someone to try recover some shiz for me? I did ring my local repair company, they wanted a minimum of £25 to take a look and a further £125 to try and recover which could take "Over a week" lol

Cheers

Ry

[sideways14a]

You could try one of the many file/partition recovery options, just google it for millions of applications and try it.

As for a NAS this is the way to go for people wanting to store loads.

Set up a NAS on your network which all your devices can see and have access to its share and it will be better.

The best setups are the new boxes which can do unattended continues backups to cloud services like google drive ect.. This way you always have multiple backups, especially if you use raid ect.

[R3K1355]

It's ****ed, like properly ****ed.

You've smooshed the insides up by dropping it while it was doing things, there's not much coming back from that.

[ryry92]

You could try one of the many file/partition recovery options, just google it for millions of applications and try it.

As for a NAS this is the way to go for people wanting to store loads.

Set up a NAS on your network which all your devices can see and have access to its share and it will be better.

The best setups are the new boxes which can do unattended continues backups to cloud services like google drive ect.. This way you always have multiple backups, especially if you use raid ect.

I'll do some revision and then pick the best three. Might need your opinion on those lol

Cheers

Ry

[gabriel90]

Currys do a £80 data recovery (must include another HDD to back it up to!). If it fails the recovery you get the £80 back. It's £700 to repair a physically damaged HDD though...

[ryry92]

Ohh only £700? I may as well get it done twice then

I will be leaving it for now, It's sank to the bottom of my priorities list. the first 5 things are kouki related, Following 5 are debt related ironically enough linked to the sx lol

Cheers guys

Ry

[Asht_200]

It's ****ed, like properly ****ed.

You've smooshed the insides up by dropping it while it was doing things, there's not much coming back from that.

This^^^^

I reckon when it hit the floor, the heads hit the platters and are now fubar

[ryry92]

Goodness gracious great balls of ...

Well I suppose putting everything on an external hdd wasn't very smart of me.

Lesson learnt

[Cluck]

First rule of data. Back it up. And then back it up again .

With any type of drive, be it traditional disk platters or solidstate, you have to assume that it will fail. Be that through use, misuse or abuse, it doesn't matter, at some point the drive is going to just pack up and usually without warning. There are 2 options :-

1. Get another hard drive and make sure you do regular backups of anything that is precious (I would argue that photos, being the most irreplaceable of items, should be backed up to as many different place as possible)
2. Back up your files to internet storage servers (the 'cloud'). Between the various free offerings (Microsoft's Onedrive now gives 15GB, Google Drive is 15GB IIRC, Dropbox is another 2GB etc etc) you'll probably be able to backup your entire photo library.

This is stating the obvious, but if it helps just one person on here not lose their data, then it's worth saying :-

Do NOT store anything you value on an external hard disk IF that external hard disk is the only place it is being stored


I have my files on my main hard drive, a backup copy on an external USB drive (which I update as and when I know lots of stuff has changed that I don't want to lose), another copy on another USB hard disk kept at another location, another copy kept on a NAS box (which is a RAID setup, further safeguarding the data) and finally, another copy of just my photos stored in encrypted files uploaded to various online storage areas. I've come 'this' close to losing a lot of photos in the past and I'm never risking that happening again .


EDIT : And yeah, your drive is toast. I doubt even the data recover companies would recover anything from it .

[ryry92]

I am slowly researching which NAS to go for. As fair as "RAID" ing it goes... do some already have this feature when I purchase it or will I need to do it myself / get someone to do it for me?

This is something I want to do properly this time around so I won't be rushing it lol.

Cheers

Ry

[Cluck]

As long as you get a NAS with more than one drive capability, it will have some form of RAID built in. Do NOT choose a RAID level that is striping only (RAID 0) as this will lose all of your data if one of the drives fail. If you get a 2-bay NAS box, pick RAID 1. For 4-bay NAS pick either RAID 1+0, RAID 5 or RAID 6 (of these, RAID 5 will give the most usable space with 4 drives, whilst RAID 1+0 and RAID 6 will allow for the potential for 2 drives to fail whilst still keeping your data intact).

If you just want something basic, then Netgear's ReadyNAS 102 2-bay NAS (or 104 for 4-bay) works fine and isn't a lot of money. Not going to set the world on fire for performance or features, but I've fitted 2 for customers (with Western Digital 'RED' drives) and they've been trouble-free. If you are going to use the drives regularly then look at fitting better hard disks than the 'RED' drives - with WD that means either the 'SE' drives (or RED Pro now) or move up to the RE drives. Alternatively, take a look at HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 drives (do not touch the Deskstar drives).

[sideways14a]

Google drive gives a decent 15gb free space, now if a nas could allow you to have multiple accounts to back up across then it wouldnt be too hard to back up a big box to the cloud for SFA.
Of course you will need a decent web connection, infinity would be a minimum imho.

[Asht_200]

I use Adobe Revel to back up my photos along with Drop Box and Box (I got the free 50GB upgrades - Samsung for Dropbox, BlackBerry PlayBook for Box)

Revel costs 8 quid a month, first month is unlimited backup, every month after that comes with 2GB upload limit. It also comes free with Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom

Synology make great NAS storage. They aren't the cheapest but you get a lot of options and they perform well. I also need to invest in a decent storage solution. Currently require around 12TB

[ryry92]

Google drive gives a decent 15gb free space, now if a nas could allow you to have multiple accounts to back up across then it wouldnt be too hard to back up a big box to the cloud for SFA.
Of course you will need a decent web connection, infinity would be a minimum imho.

I am with VM Fibre I have the 60GB package so that should be enough?

As for the NAS Cluck - I will check those out.. I guess best place to buy is online rather than get one from currys or pc world?

Ash - TWELVE!? Dafuq?! I thought I had a big collection lol

[Asht_200]

6 TB of music and growing, 3Tb of TV shows, 1 TB of movies.... And some room to grow