My external back-up hard drive failed, with chirping and scratching noises. I haven’t yet tried to get anything off of it because I do not have another HD big enough for all my files. Everything important I have a second back up of, in addition to the live data, but I have lost my life’s collection of youtube videos, and approximately 60GB of research into my thesis: “Variations of the Female Form”.
So my question is this: does Windows XP Pro keep a list of files anywhere that I could look at and try to recreate my collection of youtube funnies?
Not really. The drive filesystem itself will contain info on all files (MFT), but if the drive is fried then you have no way of accessing it. Try running spinright against the drive, perhaps it can be salvaged. Sometimes hitting the drive or freezing it overnight can allow it to run one last time. Also, sometimes with these drives the enclosure dies but the drive itself is fine. Plugging it straight into the SATA or getting a new enclosure will work.
Obviously you don’t have a 2nd backup of everything you consider important. You’d likely have to send it out for professional recovery at great expense if the drive was making scratching noises.
For future reference, I can recommend the Carbonite backup service. Doesn’t cost much (like $5 a month), and it automatically keeps offsite backups of your stuff. You can control what it does or doesn’t back up, and the stuff’s encrypted. It’s generally pretty well-behaved, pausing when you’re doing other stuff, so it doesn’t really bog down the machine. The storage space is advertised as being unlimited.
Never rely on a single copy of anything that matters to you.
I’d do like HorseloverFat suggests. At my last job, we used quite a few externals during the course of doing business, and generally you could get stuff off if you froze it, and/or swapped it out of the enclosure.
What you have to worry about then is data corruption that occurred as it was crapping out.