Recycled Files Issue

[silverwoods2]

My family has a 250GB external USB hard drive. We have thousands of photos and important documents saved to it. Recently, I tried to access the files so I plugged the hard drive in and turned it on. Everything opened as normal but when I want to see all the files, I could see the correct amount of folders that we had but all of them had no titles except for saying "recycled." I could open some of the files and they would have little white boxes where the pictures used to be. I immediately thought that it was my computer not reading it correctly so I plugged it into our other computer which is a iMac (My other computer is windows 10 btw). So once i plugged the hard drive into the Mac, it showed up and when I opened it that time it had NOTHING. No folders,no white files, Im really concerned about this and I need help. Any suggestions? I have a feeling that someone pulled it out without ejecting it first and it corrupted it. Please help.

 

[CountMike]

Try using a live Linux distro on USB stick.

 

[silverwoods2]

Try using a live Linux distro on USB stick.

Is that an item I need to buy or is it a program I need to install onto a usb?

 

[CountMike]

Linux is free operating system you can run live from a USB. Here+s just one of them from dozens https://www.linuxmint.com/
You can use https://rufus.akeo.ie/ to make bootable live Linux on USB. It can read NTFS system and retrieve files.

 

[maxwellmelon]

Id like to recommend to get another drive to back up to also, never rely on one hard drive to store memory's and important files.

id use a program like http://www.undelete360.com/

also make sure not to save anything new to it till you are sure you have recovered everything.

when recovering write all the files to your internal computer hard drive not to external device.