The Mystery Of The Disappearing Data

02 Jun 2013

Once upon a time there was a 500Gb WD Elements USB HDD packed full of my backed up data (code snippets, XBOX stuff, eBooks etc.). I also used this drive to store movies. A couple of days ago my daughter wanted to watch one so I showed her what was available and she found some she was interested in. I ejected the drive and gave it to her. Yesterday I was in her room connecting up her PC to a new wireless router I’d just installed and I was asking her about the movies. She took me by surprise when she said there was nothing on the drive. “Nothing on the drive” I said, “hmm that’s strange are you sure?” So I hooked it up to the PC and lo and behold nothing; not one single file. Erm “what did you do with it”. “Nothing” she says, “honest”.

So what the hell happened during the transport of the drive from one PC to another and how do I get my data back?

The answer to the first point is I’ll never know. I tried questioning the suspect further but I got the same answer. So that’s a firm dead-end. The next question is could I recover the data? Well I’ve never had to do this before so I wasn’t aware of a (preferably free) killer application that would recover the missing data. So off to Google for some suggestions. The 2 that I chose were Recuva and Pandora Recovery.

Both applications basically recovered a similar amount of data which was a small fraction of what was on the drive. I’m not saying this is the fault of the applications more of a limitation due to the state of the drive.

Move forward one day and a massive improvement and a major success. How come? Well I’m not entirely sure but I plugged the drive into another PC and I was advised that Windows had encountered some errors with the drive and would I like to fix them. Since it was knackered anyway I though why not. I opted for the full scan and after several hours it reported everything was OK. During that time, I’d been reading about more free applications which would recover files. One of them Puran File Recovery looked promising so after installing it I proceeded to let it loose on the drive. After several hours the process completed and it reported that over 10,000 files could be recovered. What a result. I wasn’t bothered about anything other than all the photos. Thankfully I was able to recover them all.

So I don’t know whether Puran File Recovery is the daddy or that things improved when I scanned and fixed the drive but whatever it was I’m just glad to get it sorted. As for the daughter, she doesn’t care either way.