Restoring external hard drive.

Kondwani

Kondwani

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John
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In a fit of madness recently I accidentally deleted about 10 years worth of images from my external hard drive. I have successfully retrieved most of the files on to a second hard drive but so that I have duplicate storage in the future I want to copy these files back to the original hard drive. I am however unsure if I should format this first or just copy across. If formatting is needed how do I do this?
 
If the hard drive is empty then there's no need to format. The files should still all be there, but unless you already formatted the drive then it will simply have 'forgotten' where it put them. There is software available that should be able to recover your images.
 
If you're 100% certain that you have everything you want from the original hard drive saved safely, I would format it before reusing. On Windows, in My Computer, right click on the drive letter and select the Format option. To decide which format (file structure?) to use, look at the Properties of the drive at the moment (pre re-formatting). On an apple machine, I'd guess that there's a similarly easy way to do the format.
 
Kondwani said:
In a fit of madness recently I accidentally deleted about 10 years worth of images from my external hard drive. I have successfully retrieved most of the files on to a second hard drive but so that I have duplicate storage in the future I want to copy these files back to the original hard drive. I am however unsure if I should format this first or just copy across. If formatting is needed how do I do this?
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Do you have all the photos you want from the first drive?

If not, do nothing and try to recover them. If you can't then do the next option.

If you do, do what @ancient_mariner says. But after that, there maybe no going back as the files will overwrite the disc locations.
 
Many thanks for your replies, most helpful.

I believe I have recovered about 95% of my files although some were not recoverable.
Nod....The file system on the old drive is NTFS but the new drive is exFAT . Will this cause an issue if I copy from the exFAT to the NTFS system ?
 
I have a Thunderbolt RAID 1 drive (so 2xHDDs in an enclosure, data 'striped' across the two HDDs, making it effectively double the size and faster to access files), which then in turn is backed up using another RAID 0 ('mirrored' data, so one drive is effectively redundant, but retains all files in case of one HDD failing) drive. Belt and braces. Periodically back important stuff up to yet another drive, which will then go back to being stored in the basement. Of course, no good if the house burns down, but then a jumbo jet or US satellite could crash onto a data centre, so...
 
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SwissPhot said:
... you can still recover your data. Unless of course the data centre is next to your home...
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Naming no names, to protect the guilty, I once worked at a major British company where someone managed, accidentally, to wipe half the tapes in the data centre silo.

Never underestimate the ability of people to undergo the dreaded Oops moment that will leave others to suffer! :headbang:
 
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AF not so much an "Oops moment" but "what the .... have I just done!!! ".
Luckily Seagate were sympathetic and sent me software to restore the missing files, and yes the lesson has been learnt.
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
Naming no names, to protect the guilty, I once worked at a major British company where someone managed, accidentally, to wipe half the tapes in the data centre silo.

Never underestimate the ability of people to undergo the dreaded Oops moment that will leave others to suffer! :headbang:
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Been there, purchased t shirt, sold the book, wrote a new book... cried.

Yeah, it's almost a rite of passage with data.
 
SwissPhot said:
ouch... did they keep their job ?
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I regret to say that my informants were useless in that case. I suspect that one or two people may have been advised to seek pastures new... :tumbleweed:
 
I think the reality often is that many folks don't appreciate the value of a (at least one) backup until something like this happens (and I'm not suggesting anyone here doesn't appreciate a backup!). Because sooner or later something WILL cause you to lose files as others have said, and yes, it's happened to me too. Sometimes a drive/hardware just gives up the ghost, sometimes it's user error.

I possibly over egg the backups but my approach is based on the mantra that you can't have too many backups!
  1. Files stored locally on my iMac
  2. Whole iMac continuously backed up to external drive #1 using Mac OSX Time Machine
  3. Local files backed up to a local external drive #2 weekly (automatic using Carbon Copy Cloner - which has other uses)
  4. Whole Mac system backed up to external drive #3 monthly
  5. Core Mac data files continuously backed up to the cloud using Backblaze (paid subscription)
#nerd #geek #neurotic (delete as applicable)
 
I would edge on the side of caution and save the original drive, then copy the recovered files to a new drive.

My backup protocol at the moment is that I duplicate my working files from one external 2Gb drive onto another, normally after I have completed working on a newly scanned film or a bunch of digital images, I have a simple Robocopy script for this. I do the same for my galleries which are a copy of the final jpegs, saved with minimal compression. I also, periodically, make two copies of the galleries which my sons keep. In the past, I have backed up the working files, the scans, spotted and cropped scans and the final uncompressed jpegs to DVD's. This is no longer viable, file sizes are constantly increasing, so I'm going to periodically backup the files to a third disk and save that somewhere.

Galleries! Well, the basic idea is that there is a gallery per film or digital session, but it isn't properly curated, also lots of the scans are duplicated because, when I was able to scan negatives, I cherry picked rather being systematic. But I also scanned lots of other images, interesting postcards and packaging, adverts, my dad's 5000(? ) slides and negatives and other people's archives. Altogether this amounts to about 70,000 images, 1Tb, or thereabouts.

I've no idea whether this will make any difference in the long run, at least someone might take care of my negatives, at the least an archivist might enjoy making fun of the pictures. Speaking of negatives, I've got some I inherited from the 1920's. And, prints of my relatives from the 19th century. In fact, my sister, who is a researcher, is astonished at our family photographic archive, compared to other families who have very little record.

Coming back to the original thread in a awy, I'm hoping that the digital archive stands the test of time and my grandchildren are able to delve into it.

Worrying though is that some of my early digital (pardon?) video files are no playable using my Windows 11 PC. Obsolete Codecs!
 
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