I have a portable hard drive I’ve been using for backing up files. It appears to have become damaged.
I bought a new portable hard drive and I’ve attempted to transfer the files from the old portable to the new one. That worked for most of my files but there are some that I couldn’t transfer.
I was transferring these files by opening both hard drives in separate windows on my laptop and dragging the files from one window to the other.
As you can probably tell, I am not a computer expert. Can somebody explain to me, in really basic terms (pictures would probably help), if there is an alternative way I can move these files from the old (probably damaged) hard drive to the new one.
I’m using Windows 10. I’ll answer other questions if I understand them.
Is this a SSD (solid state disk) or a HDD (hard disk drive, ie has a spinning disk inside)?
There are a whole lot of possible things to worry about. If the file system on the disk is damaged, that can usually be recovered with software designed for purpose. If the actual device is failing, things are more difficult. You can usually discover this using software that interrogates the SMART interface on the disk, which will report problems.
However, there are other things to think about. This doesn’t sound like a backup disk. A backup disk holds copies of files you have elsewhere. In which case you make copies from those. If you don’t have live versions, this isn’t a backup disk - more like an archive. In which case it itself needs to be backed up.
If you are not comfortable trying to recover the file system, decide how much the data is worth to you and give it to a professional to recover the data. The reason is that, if the hardware itself is failing, attempts at repairing the file system may just make things worse. Most disk recovery software will run in read only mode to allow you to see what the extent of the problem is.
So:
What is the missing data worth to you?
What do you think you would be comfortable doing, moderated by the value of the data?
Will you be sorting out a proper archive and backup system next? (Correct answer: Yes)
Answering this narrow question in only short sentences of simple words.
The drag and drop method you are using is the best there is for doing file transfer between ordinary not-failing drives. It’s also the 99.9% best way for trying to get data off failing drives.
Doing some other weird stuff with e.g. the DOS-like command line or various 3rd party apps will be no better and has vastly greater chance for you to goof by accident and fuxxor yourself unnecessarily.
@Francis_Vaughan has the big-picture answer. If indeed the old drive is dying / dead in spots then only a pro with pro (read $$$) tools can recover whatever is unreadable by Windows. And even that is iffy. Very iffy.
As he says, if what you really have is an archive drive with no other backup, you may well be looking at stupid money for a long shot at recovery of stuff that ought to have been both archived and backed up. Which are different ideas w different tools.
Every rare once in a while, a file that will not drag-copy to another drive will open in its program if you doubel-click it, and then let you do a Save As to a different drive.
I respectfully disagree, especially with the last sentence. Drag-and-drop (or the equivalent copy-n-paste) in Win-Doze is absolutely the worst method of doing a transfer when either the drive or interface is flaky.
One easy option is the command prompt “xcopy” command with the “/C” option (ignore errors) but this may not produce useful results unless there is only minor corruption on text or image files or if the alleged errors are spurious.
Anecdote: I had a similar problem when moving data from very old PATA HDDs on a failed computer to newer SATA drives. It was hard to find an external PATA interface any more and the one I got was a sort of all-purpose octopus with all imaginable interfaces, but it only worked reliably for one of the two drives I needed it for. For the other drive, where Windows copy was failing, I used a backup program (Macrium Reflect) to extract the data to another drive, and then recover all the files from there. Worked fine!
The general rule I follow is: whatever Microsoft does, someone else has done it better!
I totally endorse Macrium Reflect, which is a spectacular piece of backup software. You can move your entire Windows environment (right down to where you left your icons) from an Acer machine to a Lenovo machine or whatever. (You’ll need to download missing drivers but that’s still astonishing portability for a Windows environment, impressed this Mac user).
Without knowing exactly how the drive is damaged, and how it could potentially fail, it’s hard to make a recommendation.
For example: I used to use a utility called Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier for this kind of use case. (Haven’t touched it in a decade, don’t know how well it’s been kept up.) The key feature of this tool is that it doesn’t let itself be stopped by file issues, like the Windows vanilla copier. It basically brute-forces its way through file replication, no matter what.
This is useful if your drive has limited corruption or other sector-specific problems. You bring everything over to a fresh drive, as-is, and you hope that a file that was unopenable on the old drive becomes openable on the new one. Sometimes the applicable software for the file type is able to partially repair damage or interpolate across gaps, and you get something you can recover. There were never any guarantees, but I’d say I could get a file back (at least sufficiently well that I didn’t consider it lost) maybe half the time. (Edit to clarify: If the file is truly borked, the utility does skip it. But it doesn’t stop the copy process, the way the vanilla utility does; it proceeds to the next file. Hence, “unstoppable.”)
However, I would not use this for a drive that’s experiencing a more general mechanical failure, because brute-forcing through file data is likely to stress the mechanism and accelerate you to an unrecoverable crash. In that case, you will definitely require professional assistance.
In general, no matter what, the first thing one does is to copy the entire drive to a new one with a block for block copy. No file system in the way.
Then you try to fix any file system damage on the copy. Never do anything that writes to the disk of the failed drive. Never ever.
If the actual disk is dying get the data off asap. Lots of things can go wrong, but any attempt to write to such a drive risk making recovery a major headache.