agree, and a 5gb to put it all in is a baaaad idea. it will be used so much more that it will decrease the life span and increase the chances of something going wrong. the projects are all that is worth anything, for that you have a special drive, you dont mix it with other stuff.

I can understand someone may be short of cash and see 5 gb maybe as a lot to backup, but the freaking projects!!?? to not even have a selection of ones promising tracks backed up.. they could even be on an usb, costs nothing.

programs you can be dl again, everything else is fixable but I simply cant understand how anyone can have anything they take seriously in only one copy..what is the idea, hoping the drive will never die?

in case the "projects" wasn't only random loops and unfinished "songs" that were not going anywhere then there are youtube videos showing how to save a "dead" hhd. its hard work, but it can be done.

 

Last edited: May 9, 2018

@TonyG, @lukehh, this is true, you can exchange boards by swapping the bios (NVRAM) chip. So if you have SMD soldering ability, you're golden. Or ship it off to a repair facility as @TonyG linked (good one, by the way).
Also there's the gamble that the NVRAM isn't defective. But yes, doable. Older hdd's or different brands may be different. I used to do this all the time with IDE hard drives. Once upon a time.

 

ALWAYS keep at least one backup. I have three backup drives for sessions, and two time machines of my computer.

 

Remember to choose your future HDD not according to their price or popularity, but according to their durability / stability.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

 

They are using consumer drives in enterprise applications. Due to the vibrations there, some WD Greens didn't work at all (100% failure rate). Therefore, these results are hardly applicable to usual home use.

 

Just saying, but... you don't need to keep stuff like samples and software. This crap you can always download again. Custom samples and projects are what you want to keep, preferably at your workstation, plus some external backup drive, plus some cloud storage

 

That is why I save everything on 2 HD .

 

You're right if you have a fiber connection.But that's not the case for everyone of us.

 

In my opinion it's a good idea to keep back ups of your samples aswell.

It could be of course that if you start collecting more and more samples over the years that you will have no idea anymore where and what you have downloaded exactly at the moment you lost it. I can imagine that very well if you have a very big storage of samples.

Or maybe another reason is that your samples are not available anymore at the moment you will search for it, right?

 

@Nick12 I agree with you as to keeping back up of samples as well. With that said, the message @Qrchack was trying to convey was that you can not replace your projects and custom samples. And, therefore, those should be your number one priority. I must agree on that,too.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 10, 2018

sorry but you deserve it. Too expensive a 5 tb backup and you ask for a cheap data recovery? Get into reality please.

 

This thread is about to help how he can get back his data..not to give him wise advices what he should have done better in the past.

 

@TonyG

Oh yeah, absolutely. That's true. Maybe I understood him wrong. My bad ;)

 

No reply from Bassboy yet, hopefully he didnt throw himself off the nearest tall building yet!
Did you try the drive outside of the caddy yet? Hopefully it will show up once it's connected by sata.
If not there are several tools that you can use for data recovery, but you do need to be careful and have another disk to recover your files to... Someone mentioned Herens boot disk which is a good starting point, but among others getdataback is a great util.
Im currently recovering data from a 2tb disk that's full of tutorials... windows could not initialise the disk but with GDB recovery is going well.
I've done a lot of data recovery over the years, just make such make sure you know exactly what you are doing with recovery apps.
ITS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD NOT RECOVER TO THE SAME DISK if you are using recovery applications!!
(I'm happy to assist with step by step process, feel free to PM me)

 

No, it's not. What do you expect? Some magic recovery software that will revive a drive that barely spins? It's not a software failure, and opening the drive by yourself (provided you get special screwdrivers because they like their tamper-proof screws in HDDs) will only ruin the drive because of tiny particles scratching the platters. Running recovery software on a drive that's dying is the best way to end up losing your data or paying even more for recovery.

The most important lesson for us all is: drives die. They do. They always do. Sooner or later. Don't risk having your stuff on just one.

 

Did I say he should open his HDD? No...I just said, he could try to exchange the controller board (which is free reachable at the bottom of each drive without opening the housing) By the way...Where did he said, the drive is not spinning? Its not working..but he never made any detailed statement about the failure. If it had a headcrash and the MBR of the drive is corrupt using recovery Software is the best way to save his data. If the controller of the external housing is corrupt, its best to take the HDD out of the external housing and try to connect it directly to a computer. If the controller of the HDD is corrupt he should try to exchange it with a working one from a identic HDD which has also the same Firmware. Thats it. All these methods dont destroy any of your data..even if they dont work. Using recovery software is only dangerous if your HHDs data surface is about to detach from its base. But this is not the problem of his HHD.

 

People have already posted the possibilities left. as this thread is more and more going in the 'how to properly backup' direction I'd like to add: Having 'only' one backup is insufficient. The moment one takes the backup drive to update it he could destroy source and destination in many ways. Concerning the 'but it's pricey' guys: I guess we all have Unused 500mb and 1tb drives out in our garages. Having all the data multi rared every now and then to spread it over those old bastards is cheap.

 

That's one thing I like about my mirroring/backup externally approach. One happens automatically while you work. The other happens at nigh every several weeks at night while I sleep. Very small amount of effort involved.