hard drive glitch

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Every now and again I back up my hard drive to an external 1Tb drive. I normally only copy folders dated later than the most recent backup. Over Xmas, for want of anything better to do, I set off, but I forgetfully plugged the USB into a socket which I know to be a bit iffy, doesn’t make good contact. When I used file explorer to see what was on the external drive it came back with zilch. I suspect the iffy connection has had the same effect as removing a pen drive without going through the proper eject procedure. The external drive still works, so I just backed up everything using one of the other USB sockets. The single file it now recognises is much smaller than the figure I get using drive F/properties, which is what I would suspect as there are several previous backups hiding on there. Question is can I recover the situation? Not vital as there is still plenty of room on the drive, but wold be a ‘nice to have’ in case I’ve missed backing something up this time.

It’s too cold to go in workshop, so I need something to occupy my time

[Peter Cook 6Participant @petercook6]

First try might be to run Chkdsk on the drive which may recover the directory structure.

Beyond that you could try one of the file recovery programs that scan the drive for deleted files and can recreate the directory structure. Some are free including one from Microsoft called unsurprisingly “Windows File Recovery”. Others are paid for, but many of those will let you scan the drive to see what can be recovered, and then the paid version  gets them back. I have a ( fairly old) copy of a paid product called ActiveUndelete, but there are others.

The problem you may have is that having created new files on the disk, it may well have written the new files over the  space which was the old files.

 

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