Question data disappeared from a samsung 870 evo 2tb 2.5

[Deepwaterlife48]

so this computer has a samsung 980 pro 1tb ssd as its boot drive.
a samsung 870 evo 2tb as its main storage drive and 2 team group 2 tb drives.

upon starting my computer today. everything on my 870 evo 2tb is missing.
im not worried about the missing steam games, they can be re-downloaded. i'm not worried about the missing itunes songs, they can be re synced to my ipod. what i am nervous about is the 20 years of documents and pictures that were on the drives.

i had made a recovery drive of the os, and a backup drive of the data (docs/pictures) but the docs/pics drives for some reason, the computer will not register for some reason. its got 20 years of tax returns, resumee's, military award letters, letters from dead military friends, pictures etc.

samsung magician never gave me any indication of any issues and its like the drive was wiped or something i dont understand. the computer was turned off last night. the computer was off until 4pm eastern ish today. no power outages. not wet. not dropped nothing.


edit: crystal disk, check disk both show drive health is fine. running a program called disk drill on it. it seems to have found all the files, but its running an hour long scan and has yet to tell me if they items are recoverable, and apparently it will cost $90.
im so confused. if the drive is healthy and i didnt voluntarily delete this stuff and no one else has access to the computer, how did everything get deleted?

the hell?

and why would my backup flash drive not read either?

 

[CountMike]

so this computer has a samsung 980 pro 1tb ssd as its boot drive.
a samsung 870 evo 2tb as its main storage drive and 2 team group 2 tb drives.

upon starting my computer today. everything on my 870 evo 2tb is missing.
im not worried about the missing steam games, they can be re-downloaded. i'm not worried about the missing itunes songs, they can be re synced to my ipod. what i am nervous about is the 20 years of documents and pictures that were on the drives.

i had made a recovery drive of the os, and a backup drive of the data (docs/pictures) but the docs/pics drives for some reason, the computer will not register for some reason. its got 20 years of tax returns, resumee's, military award letters, letters from dead military friends, pictures etc.

samsung magician never gave me any indication of any issues and its like the drive was wiped or something i dont understand. the computer was turned off last night. the computer was off until 4pm eastern ish today. no power outages. not wet. not dropped nothing.


edit: crystal disk, check disk both show drive health is fine. running a program called disk drill on it. it seems to have found all the files, but its running an hour long scan and has yet to tell me if they items are recoverable, and apparently it will cost $90.
im so confused. if the drive is healthy and i didnt voluntarily delete this stuff and no one else has access to the computer, how did everything get deleted?

the hell?

and why would my backup flash drive not read either?

Whole drive missing ? Where from, file explorer? What about Disk Managment, maybe just missing letter for partition ?

 

[Lafong]

If you dig around on Internet, you will find quite a few complaints about 870 EVO disappearing...I was reading the threads yesterday as I am sorta in the market for a 4 TB SSD.

If I recall, the issue was most often seen on those drives manufactured over a particular time frame of 8 or 10 months...January to September? I can't recall if it was 2021 or 2022.

Samsung apparently not particularly forthcoming about the problem.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

Whole drive missing ? Where from, file explorer? What about Disk Managment, maybe just missing letter for partition ?

no. drive sows up in disk management and in the window in the folder explorer window. just nothing on the drive as if it was wiped.

crystal disk, samsung magician ran multiple times both show health at 99% with no values out of any particular norms.

that disk drill app took over an hour to scan. and then said nothing was recoverable. so not going to waste the $90 to try and recover the data.

tried the recover data app from piriform the company that made c cleaner. no dice. tried the winfrgui app. no dice.

i have zero clue how everything wiped itself. only 1.3 tb out of 1.8tb was used.

 

[Ralston18]

Without knowing (at least for me) what happened to the drive and data you may still have some options to try.

However, consider the options (full disclosure) to be last resorts and likely to cause more damage and further data loss.

Possible ways:

https://www.ubackup.com/data-recovery-disk/recover-deleted-files-in-windows-10-8975.html

You may also be able to apply DOS, Powershell, and Windows File Recovery (Command line interface) to attempt folder and file recovery.

E.g.:

https://petri.com/windows-file-recovery/

Perhaps start out with some Powershell cmdlets to determine if the files still exist:

https://www.easeus.com/computer-instruction/powershell-check-if-file-exists.html

Not something that I have really worked with but if no other options in play (excluding professional recovery and $) then you can try other means.

Very much depends on what you wish to do and how much time and effort can be applied.

[Note: many similar links can be found. Often just sales ads disguised as tutorials. Be cautious about any product downloads. Free, trial, subscription, or outright purchase.)

Just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

1 — Postimages

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i just dont understand what triggered the drive wipe in the first place, if everything worked friday night and was shut down properly, and wasnt touched again till yesterday afternoon at which point it was gone. it seems like its something that would have happened either un noticed friday night or the failure happened on startup yesterday and on neither occasion were any warnings or notifications given.

 

[USAFRet]

it seems like its something that would have happened either un noticed friday night or the failure happened on startup yesterday and on neither occasion were any warnings or notifications given.

All electronics work, right up until the moment they don't.
I've had drives die instantly, with zero 'warnings'.

Its still under warranty?
Free replacement from Samsung, recover the data from your backup.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yeah, unfortunately, it's hard to guess what happened remotely like this. Also unfortunately, thumb drives should never be used as the primary or only backup medium.

I'd try to get other PCs to recognize the flash drive as you'll likely have more luck.

In the future, the 321 rule is the gold standard, meaning a *minimum* of three copies of all data, on a *minimum* of two different devices or mediums, and a *minimum* of one copy of site. And at *least* one copy should be a drive that is monitored, not something you stuff in a sock drawer, else you'll never know that there's a problem with a backup until it's too late.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

when i moved from my old setups seagate barracuda 2tb hard drive, to the samsung 870 evo 2tb i used 2 flash drives. one flash drive for the os boot drive, one flash drive for the pictures/data. i did a direct transfer for the larger stuff to the two teamgroup 2tb drives. the 2 teamgroup drives which have most of my games and music are fine, the boot drive, a 980 pro 1tb m.2 is fine as is the recovery flash drive.

right now i have the boot drive the samsung 980 pro 1tb with heatsink hooked up. i made sure my recovery drive is fresh. i have fresh copies of the 2 teamgroup 2 tb's backed up fresh, and i have my old seagate 2tb hard drive hooked up in lieu of the troublesome 2tb 980 pro 2.5.

the issue is the 870 evo 2tb 2.5 drive wiped itself. the flash drive i had with the pictures and the data for some reason is also not registering either. i have not slept since the night before last. i've tried literally everything i can thing of. i figured having a flash drive backup and it on the samsung 2.5 would have been enough. now ive possibly lost 20 years of pictures, letters, recipes, songs, and a book ive been working on for 2 years and etc.

im....i dont even know right now. pictures from deployments gone. lost friends. gone. everything gone.

it hadnt been that long since i upgraded to this drive. october 25th is when i purchased it. that was the last time the backup was made. not sure why the backup doesnt work unless the whole flash drive just went kaput. but i think im pretty much <Mod Edit>.

i spent the day rebuilding what tax and military forms i could. i dont know what i can possibly do about the rest.

 

[USAFRet]

when i moved from my old setups seagate barracuda 2tb hard drive, to the samsung 980 pro 2tb i used 2 flash drives. one flash drive for the os boot drive, one flash drive for the pictures/data. i did a direct transfer for the larger stuff to the two teamgroup 2tb drives. the 2 teamgroup drives which have most of my games and music are fine, the boot drive, a 980 pro 1tb m.2 is fine as is the recovery flash drive.

right now i have the boot drive the samsung 980 pro 1tb with heatsink hooked up. i made sure my recovery drive is fresh. i have fresh copies of the 2 teamgroup 2 tb's backed up fresh, and i have my old seagate 2tb hard drive hooked up in lieu of the troublesome 2tb 980 pro 2.5.

the issue is the 980 pro 2tb 2.5 drive wiped itself. the flash drive i had with the pictures and the data for some reason is also not registering either. i have not slept since the night before last. i've tried literally everything i can thing of. i figured having a flash drive backup and it on the samsung 2.5 would have been enough. now ive possibly lost 20 years of pictures, letters, recipes, songs, and a book ive been working on for 2 years and etc.

im....i dont even know right now. pictures from deployments gone. lost friends. gone. everything gone.

"the issue is the 980 pro 2tb 2.5 drive...."

A 980 Pro is not a 2.5" format drive. In any capacity.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

"the issue is the 980 pro 2tb 2.5 drive...."

A 980 Pro is not a 2.5" format drive. In any capacity.

* sorry too many drives and numbers and i'm exhausted. the 870 evo is the 2.5 that wiped itself. the 980 pro 1tb is the boot drive. the teamgroup 2tbs are ex2's

 

[MWink64]

Despite their bad reputation for reliability, your drive doesn't have anything concerning in the SMART data. Can you spell out even more specifically what happened? You said the drive mysteriously wiped but still shows up in disk management and explorer. Did it ever prompt you to initialize or format the drive? An issue causing the drive to wipe itself would result in Windows complaining that it was uninitialized. Even aside from that, if anything caused Windows to format the drive, the TRIM command would render your data effectively irretrievable.

IF the partition remained and was not formatted, there could still be data there. In this case, you should immediately disable the Windows drive optimizer, as it will TRIM the drive on a regular basis. Go to Start > Windows Administrative Tools > Defragment and Optimize Drives > (Scheduled Optimization) Change settings > uncheck Run on a schedule.

Before wasting a ton of time with data recovery software, you may want to take a peek and see if there's much of anything on the drive. Someone else may have a more elegant way to do this but here's my quick and dirty suggestion. Download Victoria for Windows (it's free). Select the 870 EVO, go to the Test & Repair tab, click the Scan button, click View Buffer Live (at the very top-right). In the window that comes up, look at the right half and see if it's a bunch of random looking characters flying by or a mostly constant stream of dots (or other something else repetitive). If it's just dots (or something repetitive) there's probably not much hope. Either way, you can close the window and stop the test.

You mentioned your backup flash drive also failed. Can you answer my above questions for it as well? Also, what brand, model, and size is it? Did you make any attempts to recover data from it?

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

so as of friday my system ran like this.

boot drive: samsung 980 pro 1tb 75gb ish /1tb used
samsung 870 evo 2tb 1.3/1.8 tb used (documents, pictures, medical forms, written music, recipes, letters etc)
teamgroup x2 2tb ex2 1tb/2tb roughly each (games, music, etc)

worked on my book a bit after working all day. played a little of deus ex, human revolution on friday night noticed zero issues. shut the computer down, went to bed.

woken up at 530 am to go get my mother to take her to the emergency room for health issues. got back to the house circa 330 pm yesterday.

normally when i log onto my desktop samsung magician pops up on one monitor along with razer, windows defender. i noticed it said the 870 drive had 1.4gb used and was like uhhh what... i opened up folder explorer and it showed drive there but was empty. opened up recycle bin. empty. opened up disk management. drive was still and formatted but 100% empty.

ran samsung magician, crystal disk, check disk, all said drive health was at 99% and good condition.

tried disk drill, recuva from piriform, wingrui or something and a half dozen others and none of them did anything. the most they could do was return empty folders and broken files. nothing that could actually execute.

the flash drive was just a samsung 256gb flash drive i had for a while. normally i check them every couple months, but i figured since the 2.5 drive was just bought in october i would make a new copy this october on the flash as like a 1 year marker. that apparently was too long to wait. it doesnt even show up in the file explorer.

 

[MWink64]

That's really weird. I can't see how it could be a hardware issue. I'd still suggest using Victoria to see if there's much data left on the drive. You mentioned trying several data recovery utilities. Did you try PhotoRec ? It's not very user friendly but I've found it helpful.

Does the USB flash drive show up in disk management? Is it recognized at all. Backing up only once a year, and to a USB flash drive, is less than idea. Going forward, you might want to reevaluate your methods.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

yeah i am at a complete loss for understanding. google photos had a miniscule bunch of photos from last few years since i got a galaxy phone, and it auto uploads to that but unless samsung can somehow pull the files out with some magic when i send the drive in for an RMA, i think im SOL. i'm completely devastated.

yeah the flash drive doesnt show up whatsoever in file explorer or disk management. i think its dead somehow. which is extremely weird because i have a small tupperware box of about 5 drives that i keep in my desk drawer. the emergency recovery drive and all 3 of the other drives show up in both file explorer and disk management fine.
the other ones are another samsung and then amazon basics, sandisk, pny, and teamgroup drives. the box has never gotten wet. i suppose its my luck that both the 870 evo and the backup flash drive failed at the same time.

i normally check my backup drives every couple months to make sure integrity is fine, but in the last 7 months i've moved from florida to ohio and ohio back to virginia, so ive been dealing with a lot of commotion in the shuffle of two multi state moves.

from the various recovery programs i've figured out the total data lost was:

26,602 pictures and videos
141 arrangements for guitar, saxophone and keyboard.
71 poems.
21 letters from dead friends.
71 pictures with friends that are dead.
200+ recipes I've made.
300+ pages in a rough draft of a book I've been writing for about 2 years about my life and travels around the world.
Digital copies of military award letters.

plus a bunch of other documents like tax forms, medical forms etc that ive slowly been rebuilding for last 2 days. i literally havent slept since friday night, ive been trying to figure this out.

the best thing that any of the recovery programs have been able to do is restore empty folders. some of them attempted to recover pictures or data files but they couldnt actually open, the files or file extensions were too damaged.

i dont understand how the 870 evo could have failed so spectacularly that it wiped itself. if the files were mistakenly deleted id have thought theyd have been in the recycle bin, all the recovery programs i looked at said they were securely deleted/wiped. is it possible this was an outside intrusion that got by avast and windows defender? because i dont understand how none of the disk scanning software could give zero indication of anything failing, yes the drive was among a batch that could POSSIBLY have failures but stil...this seems very very weird. the fact that the stupid flash drive failed at the same time too is mind numbingly agitating.

going forward:
1. i will not just be checking backups every couple months. i will be doing fresh backups every couple months now.
2. with copies on a couple different devices like an external drive and a flash drive.
3. i have google photos auto uploading photos to their cloud now.
4. i have documents auto-uploading to the microsoft one drive cloud.

 

[DSzymborski]

I'm sorry to hear you've been unsuccessful. When there's a lesson to be learned about backups, we always hope that it's far less a cruel one than this. But I'm happy to hear that you're taking steps to automatically back up your files and photos to the cloud going forward.

 

[MWink64]

yeah i am at a complete loss for understanding. google photos had a miniscule bunch of photos from last few years since i got a galaxy phone, and it auto uploads to that but unless samsung can somehow pull the files out with some magic when i send the drive in for an RMA, i think im SOL. i'm completely devastated.

yeah the flash drive doesnt show up whatsoever in file explorer or disk management. i think its dead somehow. which is extremely weird because i have a small tupperware box of about 5 drives that i keep in my desk drawer. the emergency recovery drive and all 3 of the other drives show up in both file explorer and disk management fine.
the other ones are another samsung and then amazon basics, sandisk, pny, and teamgroup drives. the box has never gotten wet. i suppose its my luck that both the 870 evo and the backup flash drive failed at the same time.

i normally check my backup drives every couple months to make sure integrity is fine, but in the last 7 months i've moved from florida to ohio and ohio back to virginia, so ive been dealing with a lot of commotion in the shuffle of two multi state moves.

from the various recovery programs i've figured out the total data lost was:

26,602 pictures and videos
141 arrangements for guitar, saxophone and keyboard.
71 poems.
21 letters from dead friends.
71 pictures with friends that are dead.
200+ recipes I've made.
300+ pages in a rough draft of a book I've been writing for about 2 years about my life and travels around the world.
Digital copies of military award letters.

plus a bunch of other documents like tax forms, medical forms etc that ive slowly been rebuilding for last 2 days. i literally havent slept since friday night, ive been trying to figure this out.

the best thing that any of the recovery programs have been able to do is restore empty folders. some of them attempted to recover pictures or data files but they couldnt actually open, the files or file extensions were too damaged.

i dont understand how the 870 evo could have failed so spectacularly that it wiped itself. if the files were mistakenly deleted id have thought theyd have been in the recycle bin, all the recovery programs i looked at said they were securely deleted/wiped. is it possible this was an outside intrusion that got by avast and windows defender? because i dont understand how none of the disk scanning software could give zero indication of anything failing, yes the drive was among a batch that could POSSIBLY have failures but stil...this seems very very weird. the fact that the stupid flash drive failed at the same time too is mind numbingly agitating.

going forward:
1. i will not just be checking backups every couple months. i will be doing fresh backups every couple months now.
2. with copies on a couple different devices like an external drive and a flash drive.
3. i have google photos auto uploading photos to their cloud now.
4. i have documents auto-uploading to the microsoft one drive cloud.

The thing is, nothing you've shared would indicate to me that the 870 EVO has failed, let alone spectacularly. The drive did not wipe itself. If it did, there would have been no partition, no partition table, and the data recovery software wouldn't have found anything. Aside from the failed flash drive, which does happen, this doesn't sound like a hardware issue. It seems like a software issue and something that should be investigated or else it may happen again. BTW, I'm not sure there's a point to trying to RMA the drive. There's no evidence of it failing and Samsung does not provide data recovery service.

The way I see it, the drive was not wiped, nor was it formatted by Windows. If either of those were the case, the data recovery software would have found absolutely nothing. It seems like there's something there, but what, I'm not sure. It looks like something simply deleted your files and possibly overwrote them, though I'm still not certain of that. One thing you said caught my attention:

some of them attempted to recover pictures or data files but they couldnt actually open, the files or file extensions were too damaged.

Did the recovered files have extensions? Did they look correct? Incorrect extensions would be a relatively trivial issue to resolve. Did the files look to have realistic sizes? Like, they're not 0 bytes or 10GB JPEGs. By the way, you are attempting to recover the data to a DIFFERENT drive, correct? You should NEVER set the target as the drive you're attempting to recover data from.

A couple comments on your plans going forward. An external hard drive AND a flash drive sounds like a good idea. I would not recommend completely redoing the backup every couple months, at least not with the HD. With flash-based media, it will eat some endurance but ensure the data is refreshed. For the HD, you need only use something that will verify the integrity of the data. You don't want to end up with corrupt data on your main drive and inadvertently propagate it to your backups. FreeFileSync is a good tool for backing up.

BTW, did you try either of my suggestions (Victoria and PhotoRec)?

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

So for example with one of the recovery software it recovered a folder named 2010. The picture was titled beach day with **** the size was 0 bytes and when trying to open it would say cannot open file is corrupted instead of a 3-5 mb jpg.
The drive that failed was titled D: I was trying to recover to drives E, F and G. None worked. External hard drives or flash drives. Tried both. Tried my old Seagate hdd as well.

No dice.

I tried Victoria and photorec.

Victoria said it couldn't find an error. Said the drive was healthy.

Photorec was unable to do anything.

Samsung I had on the phone for a couple hours as we talked and I sent it off for rma. He thinks something about a data controller caused it to securely wipe but without it being on a test bench he couldn't say.

I have various tech items separated by dividers, kinda like silverware in the drawers on my desk. In one of the drawers I kept my flash drives, my external hard drive, my external ssd and my old m.2 drive. But they were all in separate Tupperware containers. I still don't know how the flash drive failed.

I don't know what could have deleted and overwritten the files. There were no updates performed, nothing done Friday out of the ordinary, no software changes made, no manual deletion of anything for that matter. If I had deleted something by accident it would have gone to recycling bin. But this almost no record of my data.

 

[MWink64]

If you sent the drive off, I guess there's no chance of recovering anything from it. I still can't comprehend this being a hardware issue. I strongly suspect something else is going on.

How old is the flash drive that failed? I bought a couple Samsung flash drives late last year (FIT Plus an BAR Plus) and both seem to have severely degraded. I wonder if whatever has been killing 870 EVOs is also affecting them. Even in general, flash drives aren't super reliable. If it were recognized, I'd suggest trying to recover data from it.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

The flash drive that failed was a 5 year old Samsung drive ( jan 2018). It had been used multiple times before being turned into the backup drive for my pictures and documents. Not sure if it just wore out or what.

Not sure if it contributed to the 870 dying or not. I got confirmation about ten minutes ago that the 870 reached the jersey rma station for Samsung. We will see.

 

[Deepwaterlife48]

update: after fighting samsung for nearly 3 months, they replaced the 870 evo 2.5 2tb with a new one, replaced my failed 256gb flash drive with a 500gb new one. i still can't believe both failed around the same time. mannnnnnnn.

unfortunately none of the data was ever recovered. all the pictures, videos, recipes, songs etc are permanently gone but nothing more can really be done. just awful luck.

during the process they offered to upgrade me to a 4tb 870 evo 2.5 which they DID NOT live up to. but they did upgrade the flash drive which was out of warranty with a bigger capacity.

they wouldnt tell me exactly what happened to the previous 870 and flash drives. just said hardware failures.