Series of Unfortunate Events; Massive Data Loss Advice

[fromlostdays]

Skip to end of rant for questions*

What happened? The short version is I let windows reformat my 4 gigabye external drive housing all my games. 

How did it happen? The short version is, I'm an idiot.

The longer version is, I decided this morning to take apart my entire entertainment center. I mean I got in there with twisty ties on all the wires, dusted and cleaned and organized etc. My main PC (Gaming PC) is attached to the living room tv along with consoles etc. Now after purchasing the Nintendo Switch, (and spending the last week in a zelda haze), I decided to decommission the Wii U for now until I can find a use for it, and also to take the 2 terabyte external I had hooked up to it, and since the only thing on it was Mario Kart, put the drive on my PC for extra space. So I finish cleaning, get all the drives together, plug in and I'm ready to go. I figured windows would need me to reformat the former Wii U external Drive (Western Digital just like all my drives), so I went into Disk Management, and formatted what I THOUGHT was that drive. I thought it was that drive because Disk Manager prompted me to reformat it.* The rest is history. 

I'm not necessary worried about rebuilding the sets. It'll be a little timely, but I mean its nothing I can't replace (minus some save files). My questions should be evident, and I'd appreciate any advice:

 

Question 1: I download a trial version of EaseUS Data Recovery and it looks like I can probably retore a lot of the data. I'm concerned though that if I restore in bulk, it may corrupt files which then will just sit in launchbox broken as I'm not going to go about testing every single game. Anyone have any experience with this process? I mean, my drive probably had about 70k games on it. Should I bite the bullet, pay the 70 bucks and try to recover, or just rebuild? Is there any better way?

Question 2: I have hard drives from a decade ago that still work. I have an external from 2008 that still works. I've never actually had a hard drive crash. So I never really gave much thought to backing data up. In fact, I'm a complete newb about it. Between games and media I'd be looking to backup about 6 terabytes plus, so any suggestions on the best way to do this? (As I'm reading via google, I'm understanding that buying a few more externals and just copying the stuff there and storing it might be the best solution, but I wanted to ask here).

And lastly, if you read above.... my game drive is like a year old at most, western digital 4 terabytes, but when I opened up disk manager, I was fooled because for some reason windows wasn't recognizing it. Having formatted, it seems to be working just fine, just like a new empty drive (I haven't actually tried to store anything on it yet in case I go the recovery route) but.... I mean is that a signal that drive is failing? I'd really hate to go either the replace all or recover all route only to find the hard drive fails. I have absolutely no idea why windows wasn't seeing it correctly in the first place. I was really careful when I cleaned the area etc. So... thanks for reading haha.

Any and all advice is appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Edited March 13, 2017 by fromlostdays

[Jason Carr]

@fromlostdays I don't have any experience with EaseUS Data Recovery, but I do have some experience with undelete-type applications. While they can be great, corrupted files are fairly typical with them. That said, assuming *nothing* has been written to the drive since the format, in theory it should be possible to recover all of the data on the drive, without corruption. Formatting a drive typically doesn't overwrite any data, it just rebuilds the file system and such  (or at least that's the way it used to be). So anyways, if nothing at all has been written to the drive since, the right tool should hopefully, in theory, be able to recover everything. But truthfully I haven't visited this subject since the FAT16 file system days, so take my advice on this subject with a grain of salt lol.

Per #2, backups are extremely, extremely important, as you no doubt know by now. If you're willing to spend a little cash and have a decent unmetered Internet connection, I highly recommend Crashplan because it will back up an unlimited amount of data to the cloud for a low monthly (or yearly) fee. I've used them for many years and I've literally restored terabytes and terabytes of data from them with no issues. The best part about this approach is that it's a set it and forget it solution. The worst part is the fact that it has to transfer all of your data when you first start using it, which obviously takes a while. Crashplan can also be used to sync drives and such though as well.

Lastly, drives won't typically show up in the Windows file manager unless they're formatted with a file system that Windows understands, so I don't think that's a sign of a failing drive.

[fromlostdays]

The man himself, and exactly what I needed to know. Thanks Jason! As I knew enough not to write a single thing to it, I'm going to try the data recovery. It's hours into a 12 hour scan haha. More importantly, I read an article about crashplan, with people complaining about how slow it was. Not that that seems a concern at all in my current predicament. Im not streaming from it. Just to know it's recoverable is enough. Thanks again, brother.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[SentaiBrad]

People want it to recover from their mistake and be fast? Noooooooo. Yea, sadly this stuff will take a while. I still never recovered my drive, I just called it dead and moved on.

[fromlostdays]

It hurts like a lost love for sure haha. But nah, I don't need it to be fast. Just done right. Seems like I may take a three pronged approach. I mean some sets are harder to come by etc, some I even renamed by hand, and I think I'll try to recover those, but start fresh for the easier sets. I'll probably pay more now since I decided to replace the drive (would have to anyway since I can't recover to it) plus recovery software plus new sub to the cloud = paying more than Jason did for 5 years of safety haha. So yeah, lesson learned. But, I love tinkering with this stuff. I'm actually sort of excited by the prospect of starting over.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, since my loss, I keep my Production drive locally backed up and everything else to Backblaze. It's fantastic, and I'll be covered from now on.

[DOS76]

EaseUS is awesome I've used it multiple times to recover raw drives the only caveat I can think of is that you will need a similar sized drive to write the recovered files to you can't just recover them to the same disk as it could overwrite things by doing so. The scan and recovery can take days sometimes.

[Zombeaver]

5 hours ago, SentaiBrad said:

Yea, since my loss, I keep my Production drive locally backed up and everything else to Backblaze. It's fantastic, and I'll be covered from now on.

I picked up that Humble Bundle a while back that included Backblaze and have been backing up ever since... it's got something like 400 days to go 

I've actually got the majority of the important stuff backed up already on a 5TB external that I then put in a fire-proof safe haha. I really like the security of having everything backed up off-site, but holy crap it's gonna be a while.

As far as the data recovery stuff... my experience has been pretty similar to what Jason mentioned - the last time I did it, I was able to recover some stuff, but not all because some things came out corrupted. Typically a format or file deletion doesn't actually bleach that portion of the hard drive, it just says "it's okay to write new data here". I haven't had to do it since Windows 95 though so I don't know how successful it typically is with NTFS. The good thing about emulation is that nearly all of this stuff is available in numerous places, so it's still recoverable even if the data undeletion is unsuccessful.

[fromlostdays]

Yeah I think I didn't articulate my concern correctly in terms of the data recovery part. I'm okay with having to replace corrupted files.... as long as it let's me know which ones are corrupted haha. If it doesnt... I may as well restock. No preview on these programs either, so it's sort of a leap of faith.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[DOS76]

I've always used this version of EaseUs for free http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

[SentaiBrad]

CrashPlan and BackBlaze are pretty much the same for anyone curious. Different companies, but unlimited storage, $5 a month. That's really cheap for unlimited storage.

[fromlostdays]

Patham, I'm glad my woe has inspired action. It's the right thing to do. Here's why, I started the scan of the drive last night, it said 12 hour deep scan, I just checked a little while ago... the bar moved some but it still says 12 hours. It's going to take days. My point being if it's going to take days either way, and you have to pay either way, might as well count on a backup plan that's going to cover you 100 percent. This is days until I know what if anything is actually recoverable.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[fromlostdays]

That's not a slight against the recovery software mind you. That's just a nod to the massive amount of files you have to support for this hobby.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[fromlostdays]

Oh and DOS I appreciate the heads up on the free version. I didn't write it off... I just literally don't want to start the scan over at this point haha

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[SentaiBrad]

Lets put it this way, my BackBlaze never actually "finished" from when I originally purchased it............ o,O;;

[eatkinola]

Some really great ideas here about crashplan, etc.  I agree the data recovery tools are not perfect, but they got me out of a bind once when I almost lost a lot of family photos due to my network attached storage crapping out.  The NAS had dual synced drives, and they crapped out in sync.  After that scare, I went all in and built a proper home backup solution using FreeNAS as my main NAS along with a weekly automatic backup to another server used solely to keep this backup of a backup.  It sounds a little overkill and took a bit to setup, but it's since been running quietly in the background and makes me feel good.  It takes some funds and elbow grease to setup, but it was worth it to me.  I also keep a separate offline backup of family photos and important documents.  Of course, if my entire house was blown to oblivion I'd have bigger things to worry about anyway.

If you have less time and/or money to tinker with a robust home backup solution (e.g., a single NAS should not be considered reliable as illustrated by my case), the cloud solutions mentioned above sound excellent.  Consider the time you spent collecting photos, documents, etc.  What's that time worth?  Probably a lot, and then some.

[eatkinola]

On ‎3‎/‎13‎/‎2017 at 8:03 AM, Zombeaver said:

I've actually got the majority of the important stuff backed up already on a 5TB external that I then put in a fire-proof safe haha.

Nice, glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that way.  Makes me feel a little less OCD ... just a little.

[Zombeaver]

Just now, eatkinola said:

Nice, glad to see I'm not the only one who feels that way.  Makes me feel a little less OCD ... just a little.

Hahaha yeah... we already had a fireproof safe with some physical documents in it so I was like "You know..." and bought a 5TB and dumped a bunch of the important stuff on it and locked it up. I'll definitely feel better when everything is backed up offsite but it's gonna be a good long while. I'm about 1TB down with about 7TB to go...

The good news is, Backblaze appears to prioritize the smaller files first (which is a good thing) because that 8TB was comprised of about 1.2 million files and now, with about 7TB left, it's saying I've only got about 8000 files to go... which tells me that basically everything left at this point is big stuff like movies, disc-based roms, etc. which is...basically all the stuff that's replaceable anyway. You can login to your account and actually see everything that it's backed up and the stuff that I'm most concerned with (primarily the project files/masters for my music) are already covered.

[Crush]

Instead of paying monthly fees for a backup service, buy an external USB3 Hard Drive - they are cheap now so you can even go for a 8TB external HD at a reasonable price.

Download the free DSynchronize http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

It allows you to sync one or two-way any folder on your PC with another folder anywhere (even network shares) and it is really fast as it updates only changed/new files after the first backup. You can also schedule backups so you don't have to remember to make them.

I use it to backup my Launchbox, Retroarch and Prepar3D (flight simulator 190GB folder) to my NAS.

 

[DOS76]

What is the model of your 16TB drive? I can't find any to buy at this time

 

Edited March 15, 2017 by DOS76