The weirdest thing happened today and I am absolutely gutted and baffled by it.

First, this is Windows 10 Pro, external SSD/HDD docking bay with a 2TB HDD.

I started my DAW PC as usual, selected the offline DAW partition as usual, on startup it did some drive checking or "fixing" as it said while scanning through doing its thing for about a minute, which has happened a couple of times before I assume because of turning off the external drive bay before shut down... anyway, once into the desktop I click on a folder shortcut which contains my master tracks for 2022 and an error message pops up saying the folder doesnt exist or the location has changed. I then click on my 2022 projects folder shortcut, it opens but its empty. So I try 2021 folders and so on, theyre all there, everythings intact and working as per usual.

I then open the HDD directly and sure enough, 2022 Masters folder is nowhere to be found. 2022 projects folder is there but again its empty. I went through all of the other folders to be sure theyre intact, all good. These are the only 2 folders with any issues - one has vanished, the other empty. All of these 2022 files are gone. I open my DAW and all of those projects are listed, but wont open. I then search the drive in question and oddly, some of the 2022 masters folders show up in the results, about half of them, saying "location: found/disk00006... something something. I tried opening in a new window to back track where they are but the hierarchy wont do that. None of the project folders show up in the search. UGH!!!!

System Restore wont work for the external drives. Thanks. The drive in question still has 600GB of space available.

Thank god I have backup backups elsewhere for the finished project masters that have been contracted and/or released, but not the project files. The sad part is about 90 or so "I'll come back to it" projects and the masters are missing.

I am just baffled by this and wonder if there is any way to recover these folders and files? Manually or specific program suggestions? Any help is much appreciated!

One things for sure, I am buying a new 2TB SSD tomorrow. Done with HDD.. never again.

 

Hi,
my SSD (1TB) with all my libraries (NI Kontakt, Spectrasonics, Toontrack etc.) crashed 2 weeks ago.
Suddenly all partitions became RAW instead of NTFS (before). Unaccesable.
I tried the SSD on all my computers (internal, external via USB) - SSD dead.
I tried anything to get my data back, but no way
Even my favorite tool 'recuva' couldn't access the SSD
After a lot of tryouts of several tools with no positive result, I found a tool called Wondershare RecoverIT.
You can download it as demo, and really the tool found nearly 90% of my data.
Unfortunately the demo only does a search job (don't waste your time), for recovery you gotta pay.
So I did some more searching to find a 'fully functional' version somewhere else on the web.
What can I say. I could recover nearly all my data, not all.
It took about 8 hours (overnight) to do the job on the 1TB SSD.
You need a second SSD or HDD for putting the recovered files on it during the process.

And no, I'm no employee of Wondershare or anything else.

Hope I could help a little bit
Greetz
saraque

 

Hi,
search for 'Wondershare Recoverit v10.5.13.4' on the web ;)

 

O&O DiskRecovery is your friend (if you need it quickly, send me a PM).
It even recovers files from broken partitions or disks that were differently formatted in the past.

IMPORTANT is that you NOT write any new data to the disk you want to recover files from.
Deleted files can be recovered as long as their remainings on the platter are not overwritten by other data.
If you copy/move/write any new file to that disk, the potentially restorable data could become unrecoverable
as new files could be written into the same sectors on the platter where your deleted files were stored.

Another tipp from me:
Don't go cheap on SSD's! I recommend Samsung SSD's, especially the PRO editions for important files & the OS,
EVO for everything else and QVO only for storage of stuff that can be replaced easily (e.g. installers or games).
I'm running my PRO SSD's since years, a friend had an EVO SSD for over 10 years in his system until he decided to
upgrade to a new system with m.2 option.

 

Btw. check your external disk for a hidden folder named "LOST.DIR".
If Windows repairs external drive errors when plugging in, it sometimes copies files from
broken sectors into such a folder.

 

I can not help you, but I can make people realize how important data backups are. No matter what others say, make backups on the cheapest HDDs, I do so and I'm not afraid that my computer will burn down, because I have backups

 

thats the same as not to shut down your computer, but simply switching it off. since '95 (remember that windows?) even the last user should know it!

 

@saraque thank you for taking the time to write that and make a suggestion, which I found and downloaded

 

My PC is only a few months old.. has a 12th Gen CPU, I currently have 2 Samsung M2 Nvme SSD's - one for Win11 internet and the other Win10 offline. I use the external docking bay for older HDD's that contain samples and backups of backups. The emergency plan now is to buy an internal 2TB SSD to put all projects and masters on, then backup to a currently unused 7200 RPM HDD. I also have 3 external USB drives, 2 HDD, 1 SSD, all currently near capacity so I dont use em, but plan on cleaning shit up to make room on the SSD for backing up the most important VIP backups of backups. 2TB SSD's are not cheap, so I dunno which I'll get.

I found "OO DiskRecovery Professional Admin Technician Edition 14.1.143" but it says 3 yrs old and has zero seeds. Gonna PM you, thanks!

Offhand IIRC that is part of the address that was listed where the missing post-search "found" folders and files were located Disk...LOST.DIR00006 (something like that). But the other 90 or so folders/files didnt show in the search results (tried searching 3 times). I will dig around to see if I can find the location of that damn folder!

 

That is what this is, a backup on a "cheap" (although it wasnt when I bought it) HDD

 

Poor me, I am such a eeeeediooott

Well... sometimes I turn on everything in the studio and out of the 20 things with switches I forget to switch on the damn external docking bay as ive only had it for a couple of months and never used one before. I've probably forgotten to turn it on before starting the PC, maybe 10 times, and this issue hasn't happened. I sometimes turn it off while the PC is still running, when working on something else for a long time and I dont need it for anything. Again, only a couple of times did it do that "fixing" routine at startup with nothing lost. I guess I viewed the docking device the same as any external USB drive that gets plugged in when needed and taken out when not, regardless of the PC being on or off. Anyway. apparently it does make a difference... Lesson learned - it powers on BEFORE starting PC and powers off AFTER shutting down the PC.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 15, 2022

one time windows crashed and when i restarted about 80gb's of stuff just fucking disappeared. #1 of 3,692 reasons i hate windows, lol

 

who on earth had telled you, one may plug out a usb stick, usb drive, thumb drive...as one likes it, while windows is running??? everything that stores data, has to be properly ejected!!! only than windows is able to know that its time to write any outstanding data to the storage device. modern operating systems do a lot in the background, and you have no chance to know whats done and whats not. thats why -> properly eject your storage devices, before unplugging!!! or shutdown the computer, than windows closes open buffers itself.

terrific!, your are properly horribly terrific!

 

thats the way ive always done it without any issues.. transferring files from one pc to another back and forth all the time. none issue until now. obviously I dont plug and unplug while its working on whatever its working on.. but yeah. same with Dj'ing with ext storage, those decks cant be shutoff and multiple users and sticks throughout the night in and out and in and out..

But yeah, im gonna be careful with any of these external storage decives from now on and make sure Windows says "safe to unplug" eject or whatever..