DATA Recovery! (URGENT!)

[Krait Haywire]

Hey everyone.
I need some urgent help!
I use a Seagate 1TB external HDD for storage. I checked it today and to my horror, I found out that most of my important folders were not accessible anymore.
These folders have been converted to 0 byte files with no extension, nothing whatsoever.
Kindly help as over 400 GB of my personal data is at stake.

Please see this image for more clarity :-
http://postimg.org/image/j45ivq67f/

Kindly help people.
Thank you!

 

[theyeti87]

See if this helps your recovery.

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

 

[DSzymborski]

I agree on Recuva, it's a good one to try. If software doesn't work, then you're likely looking at having to get a data recovery firm, which will cause some pain to your wallet, but if software doesn't do the trick, that'll be your option.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Even if you're successful getting your data back, please have an actual backup plan for the future. Anything that's so important that it would be terrible to lose is important enough to backup responsibly. We get questions like this, people trying to recover important data to them, way too often - a dead or dying hard drive should never cost you more than the annoyance of having to buy a new one.

 

[Krait Haywire]

Will a data recovery firm get the data for sure?

And did you look at the image? I mean, can anyone try to figure out how that happened?

Thanks for the responses!

 

[Krait Haywire]

So I tried Recuva, it failed.
I couldn't recover anything. That's sad.
Any other way people? Is this because of a virus?

I cannot really afford to lose all that.
Anyone who has encountered this?

 

[capt_taco]

Was it being used as a network drive? What I've seen happen in that case is that you'll begin a mass backup and walk away, and the first thing it will do is create empty file folders. Then as it's copying, after 10 or 15 minutes of your computer being idle except for that, it'll register a network timeout and the drive will stop copying. All the file folder names will be there, but in reality it only copied the first several gigabytes and then quit. After a very painful experience with a Seagate external drive, I learned that if it's important, take the time to connect it directly via USB unless you are using a genuine network-attached storage setup; the off-the-shelf external drives that try to do NAS with software often don't deliver.

Another external drive I owned (also by Seagate) also routinely had a similar problem where it would randomly "forget" file folders that had been copied over the network, and the result was just like you're experiencing - 0 bytes, nameless file extension. It seemed to happen more often if someone accessed the drive from a different computer than the original files came from. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to get it back. Luckily, I still had the original files, so I never went the extra step, just backed them up again via direct USB and that stopped happening.

 

[DSzymborski]

Here's a list of some other software-based options.

http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best-free-data-recovery-tools

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that a data recovery firm will be able to recover anything.

Wish I had more hopeful news for you.

 

[capt_taco]

Thinking back on it, my suspicion based on what happened in my case is that the data is all still there, it has just become disassociated from the disk's naming system. For it to be deleted and overwritten would've been a significant operation that took quite a while. I would keep at it with the data recovery software. I've personally had some success with PhotoRec in particular at recovering raw data from flash cards that were being recognized as empty, etc., so hopefully you have some luck too.

 

[puttynene]

try professional data recovery services to regain data, its expensive option but the chances of data recovery is higher.