Hard Disk Failure

[KlausK]

It hit me...  !

I maintenanced  my working computer the other day.
For that I took out all the HDDs. Put back in one by one when I was done.
All but one of them came back to life. Buuhuhuaaa!

A 4-TB drive did not make it. Can`t be started. Unreadable. Windows tells me to initialize it.
Yeah, well, if I do that I lose all data. So I am trying to recover the data for the last to days.

Analyzing it with a WD tool took 27 hours. It says there are "lots" damaged sectors.
And it wants me to try and repair those. Which means - I lose the data - of course !
So, no. Won`t do it this way.

Byte-by-Byte backup for this hard drive would take hundreds of hours (which is what my recovery tool estimates).
So, no. Won`t do it this way.

Right now my recovery tool is running a scan for the files - 3 hours in - about 20 to go...

But a test showed, there are intact files I can get back.

So, yes. That is how I do it.

What is not so nice is that the recovered files are named in a generic way.
Like "file 1258x720 15m00s_000005.mp4" or "HandBrake 1.0.7 2017040900 1920x1080 09m22s_000040.mp4".
Atm the tool has found ~ 6000 files / 560GB of data. And 336 damaged sectors.

Even though disk space is "cheap" these days, it is not cheap to double or triple all your HDDs to have clones of all the data you store.
So, no backup of the files.

One big lesson to learn from this is to invest in more expensive (cents per MB) smaller hard disk drives. 1 or 2 TB max.
The data loss will be smaller, analyzing and recovery times will be much shorter.

Since you cannot foresee when a drive fails - it sure will someday - rotate important data to newer drives.
Chances are you did it before the older drive gives up...

Make a directory file of the harddrive so you know what is on it.
Even though I used this drive every day I forgot most of what is on it (at least the details).

Make smaller data partitions! Because ---> see above.

Stupidly enough the "Horizon" workfiles are on this thing somewhere...
Let`s hope they are not all lost in the damaged sectors, sigh.

Damn it! LET THAT BE A LESSON TO YOU ALL May the God of HardDiskDrive be nice to you  

CHeers, Klaus

ps: while writing there are now ~ 9000 files / 700GB found

[Dune]

So, no backup of the files.

That is the biggest mistake ever! I would have thought you, of all, would have a backup of your files. I sincerely hope you can recover intact files. I have had a problem deleting files and emptying the dustbin too, but after recovering some files (some were important and not backupped yet), they appeared to be broken after all. So work to redo.
I have an extra flash drive now; Samsung portable SSD T5. Very fast and handy by USB to quickly backup files of the day (or of the week if I forget).

[WAS]

So, no backup of the files.

That is the biggest mistake ever! I would have thought you, of all, would have a backup of your files. I sincerely hope you can recover intact files. I have had a problem deleting files and emptying the dustbin too, but after recovering some files (some were important and not backupped yet), they appeared to be broken after all. So work to redo.
I have an extra flash drive now; Samsung portable SSD T5. Very fast and handy by USB to quickly backup files of the day (or of the week if I forget).

He sorta mentioned why. While it's cheap for the initial storage, for adequate backup of it (like 4TB HDDs) it adds up real quick.

I like to have online storage as well as physical, because with online I feel it's more secure as far as reliability goes. Servers are migrated on age brackets, and thus a lot less chance of loosing data to an old HDD.