My external harddrive (a seagate - IIRC) just crapped out on me. It has about 500 gigs (possibly 600) of movies and audio material that I would like recovered.
The drive is under warranty and if I submit it to the manufacturer, I can get a brand new drive, sans data.
This sucks.
I can also submit it to their data recovery team, which will put the data on a replacement drive, all for the low price of $1200 (that’s if I want the economy service).
So I’m seriously bummed.
Are there any cheaper alternatives? Or should I just accept my fate…
Usually when I see threads like this, my first thought is, “Just restore the data from one of your backups. You did back up, right?” But they never did, of course.
Looks like you may have learned the hard way too. When you get that new drive, get two (or three) and start a regular backup routine.
I hope someone comes along to help. But it sounds like you may be SOL. Sorry.
Remember, it’s not a question of IF your hard drive will crap out, but WHEN.
Same thing happened to me about a year ago. The only solution we found was the data recovery service you mentioned. We had to make a decision about what those pictures and videos meant to us. We paid about $1300 all told to get the data recovered. Since those were the only copies of the first pictures of our kids, it was worth it to us. But as also been said, now that irreplaceable data is backed up to two other locations. Best of luck!
Yeah, sometimes you can drop the drive into a new cage and get it to spin up and get your stuff off - that’s the first thing a recovery company would try (after running diagnostics to make sure the platters just weren’t toast).
You can call around to other data recovery companies - some might work cheaper. Its almost always possible to get the data off drives (I’ve seen them get data off drives with bullet holes through the drive - it was partial and fractured, but it was data), but it isn’t an easy, cheap process. If it can be reconstructed (i.e. it was audio and video downloads) that’s your best bet for cheap. If its videos of your kids…
I had two Western Digital MyBook external drives crap out on me. I didn’t have any valuable data on them, so I thought “what the heck”, and ripped them apart with a screwdriver. I removed the drives (which turned out to be SATA) from all the other crap, and plugged them into a Rosewill Dual Enclosure which cost about 40 bucks, and they worked fine. But, one of the disks had to be reformatted, so it lost all its data. The other did not.
Of course, I make no guarantees about your experiences.
I’ve had 3 external hard drives and 1 NAS drive crap out on me and in every case the drive was fine when I removed it and put it into a new enclosure or into a computer. Open up the case and see if you have SATA or IDE drives. Wearing an anti-static strap when you do this isn’t a bad idea.
For most people, an external drive **is **the backup.
For the OP:
What are the symptoms? Can your computer see the drive and give it a drive letter? Or is it acting as if nothing is plugged in at all? If your PC does mount the drive and give it a letter, what error messages are you getting?
My suspicions are matching the general consensus - the drive itself is probably OK, and it’s the enclosure that’s dead. Assuming the drive is a SATA model, it’s painless to pop it into another external enclosure. Or, if you’ve got a desktop PC, you can probably open the case and plug it into the motherboard. (You may need to buy an internal SATA cable to do this.)
If that lets you see your data, copy it all over to another drive, then put the drive back into the dead enclosure and ship it off for the warranty exchange.
There are other options for data recovery - Ontrack offers a free trial utility on their website - it will only recover one file, but if it can recover one file, chances are excellent that either paying for the full application or shipping it to them will result in close to 100% recovery of your files.
I’m one of them. I rotate two external drives for backup, and the one that isn’t connected to my computer is in my safe-deposit box. If one croaks, I still have the data on my computer and on the other drive. Sounds like the OP’s external drive held the only copy of the data. Hence, no backup.
Actually I had intended to get another external hard drive so that I could have a back up of that one. I thought that I would get a little more then 6 months out of the external harddrive before I’d get my ‘back up one’ (due to time/money/etc).
It’s acting as though nothing is plugged in at all. No drive, no letter, no error messages. It makes a slight beeping noise and gets warm.
I’l have to check into those options. I’m leary about messing with it to get to the drive, since I’ve never done anything like that before.