lost about 7 gigs of music...recovery?

[Zarathustra19]

I was transferring a folder to an external hard drive. I received an error message halfway through that said cannot move folder "x", it is a subdirectory of the source directory, or some such wording. The folder, containing 7+ gigs of music is MIA. Any ideas how to recover? Can it even be recovered?

 

[Tachikoma]

Hmm, the last time I had a failed move the system sort of tried to "redo" the move. Maybe leave the external hard drive connected and pray? <.<

7+ gigs isn't much though, tbh. I lost nearly 60GB >_>

 

[smsmasters]

http://www.runtime.org/

 

[milkpowder]

First of all, do not move anything onto or out of the drive.

This happened to me once and I had to buy a recovery program. I used Restorer2000 PRO 3.0 and recovered over 70GB of stuff from a reformatted (full reformat, not quick) USB 2.0 2.5" hard drive. The program is extremely efficient and very thorough. It does however cost 50USD. Depending on how valuable your data is, it may not be that ridiculous a price.

 

[Gatticus]

Yea, when you want to move stuff from one drive to another use the copy and paste command instead of move. That way if it effs up nothing gets lost. If the copy and paste is succesful then you can safely delete the original folder/files.
I had the same thing happen to me once when using cut and paste instead of copy and paste. Always use copy and paste. Here's a free file recovery tool.

http://www.download.com/3000-2248-10...age&tag=button

 

[jmmtn4aj]

Send it to professional data recovery teams. Most of the time trying to do it yourself will result in the drive being written to, resulting in the data you want to recover being overwritten. Also the damage might be physical, meaning bad sectors or something like that, so your data might not be recoverable even with the best software (though physically reading it off the platter surface with special tools might do the trick. Expensive though)

 

[CSMR]

Windows copies files before deleting the original ones doesn't it?
Any try "restoration" first. It's free.

 

[mofonyx]

Ah, but if you do recover them, they may not be as accurate a rip anymore!

 

[musicmind]

I posted in the other "version" of this thread, then I saw this longer version

@monofyx: your worries about data corruption of the audio files got me thinking. But in all probability, what has happend in this instance is that the file indeces in the MFT or FAT table are corrupted/unlocated. The audio file data itself is still there on the HDD, but the operating system is unable to "find" it because it has lost the pointer to it. So the recovery process shouldnt affect the audio fidelity of the music in anyway, (if I understand HDD file table workings correctly).

Cheers

 

[mofonyx]

Heh, I meant that in humour.

And that was a funny typo of my nick though

 

[popom]

Couple of possibilities, before you panic. Google for more info on the below.
You could try a system recovery tool, like a quick 1-click update done with Tune-Up Utilities 2007. Then you should try the freeware program Recuva, which does an amazing job of finding deleted files and folders within minutes. Then, if that fails, you should do a scandisk from your dos prompt, to see if there are any hard disc errors. Then, if those don't work, you could try a more complete recovery program like GetDataBack (be sure to get the right program, for NTFS or FAT32, depending on your file system). If none of those work, see if your hard drive is failing, which is a far bigger worry than some darned music files.

 

[justin2net]

Don't do anything. Send it to a Data recovery service if it's really precious. Or, put it in a external enclosure, get a copy of R-studio (way better than the other programs out there) and scan it. R-studio can recover alot compared to stellar phoenix and getdataback.

 

[musicmind]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mofonyx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Heh, I meant that in humour. And that was a funny typo of my nick though

Oops, lol...oh well, hopefully that brought a little cheer to a thread on data loss.

Seriously though, while the suggestions to have the disk taken to a data recovery specialist are all weill intentioned I'm sure, you will most probably be able to get your data back with any one of the mentioned data recovery programs. I got all of my approx 200 gig back quite succesfully using recover4all when Nero trashed my external HDD's Master File Table.

Best of luck.