I’ve just spent the last few days recovering my files from a 500gb external drive which corrupted while I was editing photos taken over the weekend. I thought I’d share the experience to emphasise the importance of backing up your photos and to let you know that not all is lost when a hard drive fails.
I always back up all important photos onto DVD before I edit anything. I also create a copy onto a USB External drive. When I edit photos I will also back these up to DVD. Unfortunately in this case I had a few weeks of edited work which I had on the drive but not on DVD. So as you can imagine I was more than a little worried.
A hard drive can fail in a number of ways, it can be a Physical Hard Drive Failure caused by a malfunction of the hard drive itself. You will know if it is a physical failure by the noise the drive will make. You will hear a clicking, clunking, grinding or whirring sound coming from the hard drive. If you can still boot the computer but the drive is making a lot of noise, you could still get an image of the drive or clone it to a new hard drive but that is risky. Do not try to start the computer and copy the files to an external drive because that may be too much stress on the failing hardware. The best bet is to remove the hard drive and put it into a different system to retrieve the important data from the drive with a Data Recovery Solution. If the physical hard drive crash is so bad that the computer will not boot or another system cannot see the hard drive, then you may need to send the drive out to a data recovery solution. It is not cheap but how much is your data worth?
It may also be caused by a Logical Hard Drive Failure. A logical failure occurs when the hard drive is healthy but you cannot boot into the operating system. This can be caused by many different factors. A virus, system driver conflict, human error or a software malfunction can cause a logical hard drive crash. When this type of failure happens, imaging or cloning the computer will do no good. Do not try to reinstall Windows or run the useless operating system tools like CHKDSK because those tools can just make matters worse. Just because you cannot access your data on a crashed hard drive does not mean that it is not still present on the drive. You will need a software data recovery solution like Stellar Phoenix to retrieve your data.
In my case it was the latter. Each time I tried to access the data I received the message that I should Format the Drive. I knew that the drive had not failed totally and that my files should be retrievable.
I opened Stellar Phoenix and ran the scan. This may take 10-15 mins depending on the size of the drive. Once scanned you can choose which files you need to recover. If you decide to recover everything, you will need an equal amount of free space on your hard drive, be prepared, a complete restore may take a couple of days !!
Once restored, check the validity of the restored files, you may find a few are corrupt. Unless you have an original file, these may be lost forever. I had what I felt was a good routine for preserving my files, but no system is fool-proof. If your files are important to you, plan for disaster. It can happen to anyone, but if it happens to you, don’t panic, in most cases there is a solution.
My restore has been running since last night and is still running as I type. All of the recent work has successfully been restored, and I expect to restore everything in the next few hours, thanks to some very useful software. Phew, I can smile again… 🙂
Ciaran