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Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spins. I re

Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spins. I recently went through some of my own drives (old backups from many years ago as well as one 2 TB drive in my NAS that decided it wanted to start failing). Photorec[0] and ddrescue[1] came in handy. They can take a long time to run (I did multiple ddrescue passes on my 2TB drive and recovered all but 16 MB, but it took about a week's worth of time), but it may be worth a shot. [0] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

Alupis 10y ago
> Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spin Data recovery will likely work, since they mechanically work and Windows does see them as drives, just no data (says uninitialized). My initial thought was it's just the partition table that was corrupted, so something like TestDisk might easily restore the table and allow me to extract my data. Otherwise something more serious would be needed... at this point though, I can't remember what's on the drives, so my effort level is minimal. My "total loss" statement was more along the lines of using hard disks for backups. Having a corrupted partition table from the drive sitting on a shelf isn't a good thing to rely on for backups. If it were business data, it would have been on tapes instead of disks.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  Fair enough. The drives I looked at didn't have any particularly pertinent information on them either, but I actually made a pretty fun weekend out of learning how to recover data and re-live some of my personal history starting from around 1999. I felt like some sort of digital archeologist -- reading e-mails and looking at pictures.

Alupis 10y ago

> Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still spin Data recovery will likely work, since they mechanically work and Windows does see them as drives, just no data (says uninitialized). My initial thought was it's just the partition table that was corrupted, so something like TestDisk might easily restore the table and allow me to extract my data. Otherwise something more serious would be needed... at this point though, I can't remember what's on the drives, so my effort level is minimal. My "total loss" statement was more along the lines of using hard disks for backups. Having a corrupted partition table from the drive sitting on a shelf isn't a good thing to rely on for backups. If it were business data, it would have been on tapes instead of disks.

iamatworknow 10y ago
Fair enough. The drives I looked at didn't have any particularly pertinent information on them either, but I actually made a pretty fun weekend out of learning how to recover data and re-live some of my personal history starting from around 1999. I felt like some sort of digital archeologist -- reading e-mails and looking at pictures.