My experience has largely been very good. I use their USB drives for backup AND their enterprise drives in a NAS setup as RAID 6. I have never had any problems with Seagate service whenever I have had to return a drive inside the warranty period. Over 10+ years, I have only returned 3 drives. Once I used their software to recover a drive that was NOT accessible from Windows and the recovery worked perfectly. Despite the accolades that many attribute to WD, I have not had a reason/urge to change brands.

Cloud storage is also at risk as some clouds have gone down and lost millions of data files/photos/videos FOREVER, never to be recovered.

Use cloud storage as just one of your storage backups. Use multiple backup solutions and redo them every few years as all drives can fail over time.

FYI, I have two 8TB Seagate drives that have been problem free for years. I am about to buy another 8TB Seagate as one of my Fantom drives has died. I use the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy to do these large data transfers for me from any dead drive. I have never used Seagate's own recovery service but it is good to hear they are reliable and ready to help. My Seagate drives are long past any warranty, but are still working fine (knock on wood).

All but one of my large WD drives have failed over time, so even though Seagate has been owned by WD for the past few years, Seagate and WD drives are made in different plants and to different specs. I do NOT recommend WD drives anymore. My Geek Squad told me they have seen a larger number of failed WD hard drives in the past few years than any other brand. They seem to have lost their quality control, sadly. I have been a pro in this business for nearly 50 years and have owned many brands of drives, including loads of WD drives, but I personally will NEVER buy another WD drive, and will never recommend them anymore to anyone.

Cheers and best to you.

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.

With all due respect, I’m going to have two disagree on several points:

1) Regardless of what the “geek squad” says, the data from Backblaze that Jerry posted earlier in this thread tells a different story, and they keep statistics on tens of thousands of drives in 24x7x365 service. And as an aside, if your data matters, you should find better tech support than the geek squad, which is like going to Walmart for computer advice.

2)WD does NOT own Seagate. Both WD and Seagate have bought smaller companies and between them, they own the rotating media marketplace.

3) No MAJOR cloud service has ever failed and lost “millions of data files”. By major, I mean the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, etc., which are the cloud services you should be using for a disaster recovery copy of your data or archiving. If you have different information, please post it. Now if you choose any of the hundred+ “mom and pop” cloud storage businesses, you’re on your own (and deserve what you get).

This from a data storage “pro” for over 50 years…

Cheers.