TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Depends on the file system the external drive is formatted with. If FAT32 or ExFAT (which many external drives are), the Windows machine can read them just fine. If HFS+ or AFS, there are a number of utilities that will allow a PC to read them.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If you own a Mac, it’s trivial to set up Time Machine to back up to ICloud (or another service of your choice) regularly. It’s so simple, requires no user involvement other than setting up a monthly credit card draft to pay for ICloud, that I just can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want that security.

Scruples Loc: Brooklyn, New York

Uggh! It sounds like the end of all your work. I really don't think so. I had a similar corrupted hard drive too. I was able to salvage my work by going to a recovery repair specialist. ( I don't advertise because I am not endorsed or paid by them. ) That may be your best bet. Good Luck!
Happy Shooting!
rph_steven@yahoo.com

elf

I have used "Glary undelete" on my windows machine. Maybe they have software for Mac also. It is rather slow but so far it has found 995 mb. There are many programs out there but Glary is the only one that I tried that was free and worked. Say a little prayer and give it a try. Ed

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Nothing back from the OP for awhile, and as suggested, if he has another Mac available, then I’d try that first. If no joy, I’d attach it to a PC and see if it shows up as a drive letter in file explorer. If not, I would check to see if the drive was spinning. If so, I would remove it from the case and attach directly to a SATA port and power. If I could see it then, I’d open storage management and find out the file system and properties. If it was a Windows readable file system (FAT, FAT16, FAT 32, exFAT or NTFS) and properties showed the files, i’d copy it to another storage device before doing anything else. Then, If I could open the files, I’d be done. If not, I’d run chkdsk /f on the copy from the command prompt and see if Windows could repair the volume. If that was unsuccessful and the drive was spinning and showed data, but was unreadable, I’d resort to a recovery application.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

You mistake my reasoning - of course I use the interwebs - have since the Internet existed (that is, before the WWW was invented) and my point has zero to do with any security aspect. My issue with cloud (and I fully understand what it is - so don't worry) is that unless you have OC48 connection speeds it can take a very long time to upload or download the potentially huge quantities of data when you start to accrue digital images (I'm at about 50K images myself at this point). By rotating each week between 3 sets of external hard drives, one of which is truly off site (in the vault at m bank in fact), the very worst loss I can experience is a week's worth of data. And if my house explodes (or my neighbor's meth lab explodes, leading to my home's destruction) then I can connect the drive in the vault to the new replacement computer and be on my way. But it won't take me weeks to download a terabyte of data. Got the idea now?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Not sure what your internet speed is, but many cities and towns routinely provide 200 Mb download speed as standard with 1 Gb as an option. Assuming 200 Mb and the actual transfer is 1/2 that speed, then you can download >40 Gbytes/hour or ~1TByte in a 24 hour day or in 5hours if you have Gb speed. And remember, that's as a background task and only in the event you lose both primary and backup storage. Now in fairness, the upload speed to seed the cloud may be 1/5 to 1/10 that, so it may take a week, but you only do it once (again as a background task), and after that you only send changes and new files.

Now if you're in the country using DSL, T1 or 10 Mb download, then it is not a good solution. One final thing (for those that do want to use it), there are companies that will loan you a HD which you can send them to seed the cloud, and they will loan you one with all your data if you ever need to restore. The cloud isn't practical for everyone, but for those with good internet speed, it's by far more robust than any home made DR plan you can devise.

Cheers

Harvey Loc: Pioneer, CA

I have stumbled thru saving my photos from one PC to the other by backups on CDs and one large external drive - now several years old - recently I had trouble/could not bring up all the photos on my 2 newer lap tops that I am sure need more memory - with fear it was dying I bought one of those 'Photosticks' that are advertised on the internet-the $59 version - in an hour or so it found and saved 3,900 - 14 yrs of photos from my computer and the 2 partitions on that external hard drive.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If you’re gong to save to optical disk, let me suggest you invest in a bluRay MDisk drive and save to MDisks. They come in 25 and 100GB size disks, and it’s about the most bullet proof media you can buy, CDs and DVDs unfortunately can degrade over time.

Al P.

First, be sure to have a computer professional check out the external hard drive.
If it works when attached to a windows computer or mac, then the problem is with your main computer. If not, it's either due to some corruption of the FAT (file allocation table - it tells the computer where each file is located, and where it starts and stops, and if the file is fragmented, where each fragment starts & stops, so it can be reassembled when accessed). If you do have a problem, and it's both with your main computer AND the hard drive (e.g., inadvertently erasing the files), you might go to whatever the MAC equivalent of the Windows "Trash" folder is. If not, there are several file recovery companies out there. Not cheap, but the one I used (when we lost a week's worth of accounts receivables and appointment data from my med practice) - we used FileSavers: https://www.filesaversdatarecovery.com/
They only charge if they recover all your data; otherwise, whatever they salvage is yours for free. They're pretty confident, because they really know what they're doing. I think there are a couple of other companies out there, too.
I now back up all my practice files twice-daily, encrypted onto a secure Dropbox file. Nice thing about DropBox is that if you delete a file, you can painlessly undelete it if you want, within 30 days.
- And use a condom (to avoid viruses) - (joke)

Robert1 Loc: Davie, FL

I don't rely on drives, that's why on top of having all my pictures on the computer's drive and external drive, I make prints of all my pictures, and save them to a DVD/photo CD, so if both drives die, I still have my pictures.

TonyBrown

That’s my biggest fear. I am so sorry to hear that. I hope you can recover them. I know it’s a bit like “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, but as well as storing my pics on my computer and an external hard drive I also keep a back up SD card copy. I have a friend who also keeps a backup drive at another address in case his house burns down and he loses all his data at home!

11bravo

The FIRST thing to do with a suspect drive is to clone it if it is at all readable. Cloning doesn't care how the drive is formatted (FAT, NTFS, Mac, whatever), it just copies sector by sector to another drive (just make sure 2nd drive is same or larger).

Then use the COPY drive for recovery attempts. This moves the "strain" of repair efforts to a new drive, not a failing one.

Yes, cloning might stress the failing drive, but no more so than copying all the files off of it, it's just that now you have an exact copy of the full drive. For the totally paranoid, clone the clone. Now, if any recovery attempt turns destructive, you can try again with another clone of the clone.

Bottom line is you want to minimize the stress to the failing drive, operating on a cloned copy instead.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

This happens to me with my brand new SSD from WD. The pictures are still on the drive but the iMAC doesn’t see them. I have tried everything. Even Apple support and Western Digital couldn’t help me. The only way to make iMAC see them is to restart the computer. FWIW, this happens on my MacBook Pro too. Needless to say, I don’t use that drive.

I find it strange that BOTH of your drives are SUDDENLY invisible to your MAC. For your sake, I hope the pictures are still on the drives and just invisible to your computer.

kkayser

Keep some backups forever. I recently discovered that all my photos before 2008 had disappeared. I did not notice the disappearance until long after it occurred. The photos were missing from the cloud and all recent backups. I recovered them from an old backup.

I do weekly backups of a disk image. I rotate two 2tb disks weekly keeping the unused one in a fireproof disk box. When the 2tb disk approaches full, I delete the 2d 3rd and 4th week of each month, keeping the first week of the month. When I get 12 or so months I retire the disk.

It is also important to check your backups. I was using Backblaze until I discovered that they were not backing up my email and bookmarks.

In the initial case presented here, the first thing to do is recover the photos immediately to another hard drive. Then make a disk image. Then take the computer to a good computer pro to have it repaired and the data recovered if necessary. In this case I doubt that the data has been lost. It is much more likely that the computer has failed than that two hard drives failed within two days of each other.