Photoladybon Loc: Long Island

Within the past two months, I have had two separate Seagate External HD fail on me. Both were my main A vs B drives. Needless to say I did back up to a B drive but seem to have lost the last week's images because A did not backup to B via Chrono Sync despite receiving a report to the contrary.
I spoke with Seagate and they offered for me to return the less than 6 week old 8T drive to them and see if they could recover the images (thousands) but I had to provide a minimum of 30 days for them to keep the drive. They also sent me a recovery software which I am running right now but a full run is over 16 hours. I don't know how it will recover when I can't even get disk utility to read the drive as it remains unmounted and nothing I do can mount it. There's obviously a defect in the drive.
It cost me a few hundred dollars in professional time to get the other 8T backup after a corruption. It said I could copy and transfer but not save, so absolutely able to save those many thousands of images. The B drive continues to work well.
Now I have two 8T drives that don't work well and I need to rescue my images off the second one. If my attempts fail, I will send back (begrudgingly) to Seagate to see what they can do.
I have been using a Mac book pro approximately 6 years old running Monterrey. All the rest of the computer functions work including three other Seagate drives holding older images. I followed all steps recommended by Seagate to verify the intergrity of this HD (or non integrity??).
Has anyone else experienced this horrific situation and if so what was the resolution? And also, now, I'm looking for other suggestions/solutions/storage options. Looking to the Hogs for help. TIA.

ken_stern Loc: Yorba Linda, Ca

not YET

aphelps Loc: Central Ohio

I have several 3TB to 8TB External Seagate drives operating as backups with no problems yet. I did have a 1 TB running 24/7. It failed without warning shortly after 1 year. So much for the 1 year warranty!

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

I have always had problems with Seagate Externals. Now I use Western Digital. No problems for about three years now!

aphelps Loc: Central Ohio

If the recovery software did not work, I suspect you may have 2 failing HDs. While you still can, I would get a WDBlack HDD and transfer all readable data from A and B. Then deal with Seagate.

DebAnn Loc: Toronto

Sorry to hear of your troubles. I have been using a couple of Seagate external drives for several years with no problems.

jcboy3

I've had several hard drive failures over the years. I've never lost data. I follow these rules:
1. Three copies of the data; original, online backup, offline backup.
2. Whenever a drive throws an error, it is replaced.
3. Offline backup swapped with online backup periodically for drive refresh.
4. Use only high quality drives (enterprise quality).
5. At least one drive is Raid 5 for self recovery.
6. Use drivers that report errors. This is important if you use Apple Mac computers, because the Mac OS doesn't do good drive monitoring.

My preference is SoftRAID for driver software and Raid management.

Not sure what types of drives you have. If you are using inexpensive Seagate drives, you quite likely have SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives. These are horrid, and have extremely poor performance after an initial write. They are suitable for archive purposes upon the first write, and very light update. But you don't want to reuse them due to the architecture. I have used them specifically for archive. If I need to rewrite, I buy a new drive and recycle the old. Be sure that any drives you get in the future are CMR. Seagate have been pushing SMR drives into their higher capacity systems, and have not been forthcoming about it.

As for you specific case; I don't know how ChronoSync could have completed a backup and had it disappear from the target drive. Unless the drive error on the source drive resulted in loss of data before the backup.

Seagate recovery software may go directly to the drive; usually a drive would be dismounted by the software even if it had been mounted by the operating system. The recovery software would not use the OS file system for recovery, as the damage to the drive most likely includes damage to the file system.

One thing you learn with high capacity systems is how long it takes to perform functions on the drives. Especially something like drive certification, which takes days to just do one or two passes.

I recommend you get a large capacity RAID system for one set of backups. I usually keep mine offline (except for a RAID system for video processing), and periodically swap them in for refresh whether I need to run a backup to them. And make sure all of your drives are high quality drives. They cost more (sometimes much more), but it's worth it in my opinion. What are you going to do if you lose your data?

One last thing; I keep most of my current work on my main work drive, which is backed up nightly. I then migrate that data as appropriate to other drives when I won't be accessing it as frequently. Those drives are backed up when data is migrated to them, which I do on an as needed basis. When the backup is completed, I swap with the second backup drives and repeat. At no time are all three drives plugged in at the same time.

jcboy3

If your drive only has a 1 year warranty, your drives are not good quality. All of my drives have 5 year warranties. And I have never had an issue with Seagate replacing the drives under warranty. I run a lot of data, and have had a few failures. I have over 100TB of source and backup drives; odds are with that many drives there will be a failure every few years.

UTMike Loc: South Jordan, UT

When mine failed Seagate did a good recovery job, but it took time.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

[quote=Photoladybon]Within the past two months, I have had two separate Seagate External HD fail on me. Both were my main A vs B drives. Needless to say I did back up to a B drive but seem to have lost the last week's images because A did not backup to B via Chrono Sync despite receiving a report to the contrary.

Sorry to read about your problem.
This is why I have been recommending for years that everyone have at least four backup drives.
I have five.
A lot cheaper than recovery services.

Klickitatdave Loc: Seattle Washington

I have only experienced a total hard drive failure once and it was a drive that was over 5 years old. It probably failed due to a sudden power outage when the system was writing to the drive. However, lesson learned and when S.M.A.R.T. built in diagnostics came into being I regularly check the health of my drives. The diagnostic gives a lot of information as to the health of the drive and can key you in if the drive is ready to fail. I recommend CrystalDiskInfo software to accomplish these checks. I hope that you are able to recover your files and another poster is right; a person has to back up their important data even though it is a chore at times.

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

If the drive will not mount, there's a good chance that the problem is the electronics in the drive that interfaces the disk with the computer. If that is so, the disk will still have all the data and can be recovered. But it means replacing the electronics, not something you can do at home.

If the drive will mount, but will not read or reports frequent errors, that could be the disk itself.

OldSchool-WI Loc: Brandon, Wisconsin 53919

__________________________(reply)
You have probably "pressed the envelop" with an 8T drive? But then, maybe you have a million images. I know this answer does not help your situation in the slightest, but I have a dozen Toshiba and Seagate peripheral drives in either 1/2T and a few 1T and never had any trouble. I buy cameras and not new computers, though. My old Toughbook has four USB ports plus an SD card slot. And I transfer my files back and forth with ACDsee-Classic. I also use a pp ACDsee program as well, but adjust file types and copy and delete files using ACDsee-Classic. That is a small program so I can open a half dozen copies with different directories if I choose. I also use four different browsers--so I can open different windows without conflict. So---I am still happy with my old computer and until it doesn't do what I intend--I will keep it.----------------

bioteacher Loc: Brooklyn, NY

Seagate has rescued data from a number of my hard drives and returned a new hard drive with the data on it. Call 800-732-4283 - Seagate Data Recovery

sabfish

In terms of your request for suggested backup methods, perhaps you should transition to cloud backup. I realize that this can be considerably more expensive, but the likelihood of losing images is very small.