Data Recovery Recommendations

[dix]

Well, at the end of the day I'm going to have to send it somewhere for recovery after all. Subsequent tries with Data Rescue, even smaller batches, failed and now even DR can't see the drive. Whereas it sounded like the drive was spinning before, now it does not. Since I bought Data Rescue I get a $100 discount from them if I send it them for recovery.

…apart from some initial weirdness running my MP from the backup boot drive (which also died somewhere along the way while I was trying to rescue the data) everything seems okay now.

[James Steele]

So sorry to hear that. Hope it isn't expensive!

[dix]

$300 aprox. Since it was an archive-drive it's not crucial I get it right away. I'll wait until I'm flush to send it in.

How do others archive non-criticaI projects I wonder. This was the very first drive I started using when I switched from archiving to DVD (which is no longer really practical). Cloud backup for the 10+TB I need isn't practical either (yet). …weird thing is that this drive has barely been used compared to drives that have been in use even before I got this, now dead, Caviar Green. Was it just bad luck?

[bayswater]

I recently had a 2T drive fail. Most of what was on it is recoverable, but I had a look here to see about recovery options, and googled the same, because it I'm happy to spend a few dollars to avoid that amount of work. Via google, most of the hits were for an app called Disk Drill, but it is not mentioned here. I've been using the demo which lets you use QuickLook to preview what it found on the disk, but it won't let you recover it without buying the full version. The problem is that a lot of the files on it are not viewable via QuickLook, and the help site says if you can't preview it, don't assume it's recoverable. It has been running now for 44 hours, and says it has 24 hours left although it said that 30 hours ago.

Does anyone have any thoughts about Disk Drill before I buy it? (It's $89)

TIA

[dix]

"Disk Drill", yikes! That's not a very good image to invoke.

Your experience sounds similar to my harrowing tail with Data Rescue. My recovery self aborted about eight hours in. Hopefully yours will have a happier ending. Let us know what happens.

[bayswater]

I wondered about the name too.

So far it looks OK. It took 51 hours to scan the disk. It autosaves the state of the scan and what it has found frequently.

It reported a lot of bad sectors, claimed to find about 2,500 files intact, and to recover about 15,000 more. The found files in a format viewable in QuickLook seemed to be OK. Most of the recovered files I could view looked like those I had deleted over the years.

It has kept most of the folder structure, but not all of it. I guess that would depend on how damaged the directories are.

Think I'll bite the bullet and license it, and see what happens. Curiosity is killing me, and there's nothing to lose.

[bayswater]

After licensing and running the recovery piece of Disk Drill for about 18 hours, results are mixed. It is recovering everything it says it found, but in some cases the files are incomplete, and directories are sometimes missing a couple of the files that were in them originally.

I'm not surprised: if it was easy to recover the files, I suppose DiskUtility could have repaired the disk in first place.

But compared to dix's experience of an abort after 8 hours, this has been humming along now for three days without interruption, so it's not all bad.