avmoran Loc: Maryland

Hi All

I have used external Drives for storage for years and exchange them every 3-4 years for I know they degrade. My 2 year old Western Digital has lost its identity as a drive, storage peripheral and I cannot convince it that it is not a computer

This Drive hold nearly 500K of photos ~10 years of work

Any ideas

ebbote Loc: Hockley, Texas

Avmoran, have you tried a different USB port? Also it may not be the drive but the USB enclosure that it is in, sometimes they give up the ghost, that is why I don't use USB drives much anymore, good luck.

Al Beatty Loc: Boise, Idaho

Hi Avmoran,
I had a problem similar to your and took the drive to my local computer repair store and they mounted the drive in a new housing for about $50.00. Good luck with recovering your data. Take care & ...

FL Streetrodder

I had a similar problem a number of years ago. It turned out that the optical reading head in the hard drive was the culprit and I was told that there were companies that may be able to recover data from the drive, but the cost was more than I wished to bear - an initial fee of $500 with no guarantee that the files could be recovered! I would definitely try the two previous suggestions, using a different USB port or buying a new hard drive enclosure.

avmoran Loc: Maryland

Thanks All

I also got a recovery fee estimate of $500 with only a 60% chance of recovery.

Charles 46277 Loc: Fulton County, KY

Anybody use DVD disks for backup?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I used to use CD/DVDs for backup. It was 20 years ago and it was a royal pain in the butt. They don't hold enough and they don't have enough reliability for archiving files.

I have 1.2 TBytes of images and another 0.6 TBytes of other files. That would require more than 400 DVDs to store. How do you keep track of what's on them?

Charles 46277 Loc: Fulton County, KY

I have had my camera 3 years and I have not used half the 32 GB card in it. I save some to folders in my computer, and some of these are duplicated on USB memory sticks. I do have a 1000 GB external hard drive, but I just use that for backing up the computer. I was wondering because apparently most methods seem to be unreliable, from what was said here?

I am not good at sorting and filing pictures--mainly because I don't sell them and I don't have to find them. I ought to at least start a system for new pictures. Most of them are disposable, like eBay pics or pics sent to family. I save prints of the ones I like best, mostly 13x19 in a portfolio folder. Those are saved to identifiable files in the computer.

DVD's have plenty of room for most of my files, or for that matter I could use 2, 4, or 8 GB cards and file those in envelopes--they are cheap enough.

I am used to large format, so I don't try to take a lot of shots. A folder on a trip somewhere could just be filed on the camera card used for that trip. The hard thing would be to classify shots for saving--the same shot could be classified 5 or 6 different ways.

VTMatwood Loc: Displaced Vermonta in Central New Hampsha

There are many solutions that have been suggested for recovering drives on the forum, and fortunately I have not needed to use any of them. I might suggest, after sorting your current drive issue out that you use a multi-backup approach. I (and numerous other hoggers) store images in three different places - my PC, a NAS in my home, and in the Amazon cloud (part of my Amazon prime account benefits). When I add pics to my PC drive, they are auto-copied to the Amazon cloud. To get them on the NAS, I simply wrote a small .bat file that copies them to the NAS. As an extra precaution (not just for my images) I do a full backup every other day and copy that to my NAS at night so I have two copies of it as well. (Incidentally, I use a very similar strategy for my personal documents, except I store them in Dropbox versus Amazon cloud). The last time I lost a HDD in my PC, I simply added a new one, restored from backup, and copied the pics from my NAS to the new PC drive to make sure I didn't miss any.

I have only needed to recover a disk once - for work. They recovered the entire contents of the disk, but it was quite pricey. Best of luck with your disk recovery.

avmoran Loc: Maryland

Here in Maryland we have the Computer Handyman of Maryland and he will be here next week. He is hoping for a quick fix that he has used before for this problem at a fraction of the cost of recovery and he is hoping for full recovery or close. Crossing fingers

HOHIMER

I have heard putting a drive in the freezer sometimes allows it to work again (long enough to retrieve some of the files). I have not tried this however. Good luck on your recovery.

pj81156 Loc: St. Petersburg, FL

I lost all my photos on my computer. No one could retrieve them. It was at this point that I went back to film. I have never lost a negative or slide.
And, some of them are more than 60 years old.

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

That's disastrous. Sorry. Just a couple of suggestions that may be worth a try:
1. Connect the external to a different computer
2. Open the case of the external, purchase an inexpensive usb/sata cable and connect the drive with it.
3. Try some online recovery software. I had a dedicated internal photo drive. I developed bad sectors. Even thought I backed up (religiously) the backup file was corrupt due to the bad sectors. I was able to recover many, but not all of my images via the purchased software. Of course the drive would have to be recognized for this to work.
Good luck,
Mark

hank6595 Loc: Amesbury, MA

I have been using Carbonite for a number of years. They came to the rescue when my computer went down and I recovered everything. Also, when I purchased this computer, they transferred all my files from the old
computer. I also make backup DVD's as another storage system. Just as soon as I download images, I make the DVD and have it in a fire resistive case and if someone want a copy, I make up another DVD for them.
I have over 20,000 images in this computer. tHANKs

markngolf Loc: Bridgewater, NJ

You asked for help on the issue of the external. A few offered some ideas. Then, various backup procedures entered and side tracked the original post. This seems to happen often on UHH. Can't we all stick to the subject, particularly when a member is looking for assistance? The comments and replies offering a variety of backup procedures is interesting, but offers no assistance to avmoran!! These have already been posted an uncountable number of times.
Mark