Easily Recover Deleted Photos, Files and More

When it rains, it really does pour. Naturally, it would only make sense that — in an extreme streak of bad luck — my external hard drive died.

Some would say “that sucks” and move on in my situation. But, being a designer and pretend photographer, I store a lot of files. In fact, in the past four years, I’ve created and kept over 50,000 of them (that’s more miles than I had put on my car in the same time frame) — all of which were on that external hard drive. As the keeper of my photo albums, design archives and more, moving on from the dead drive wasn’t going to be an option.

Luckily, I possess a special strain of nerd and have saved deleted files from corrupt SD cards in the past. I knew it was possible — this was just a much larger scale. Can someone really recover that much data?

The answer — maybe. Hold on to a little hope — there are definite options for trying to retrieve presumably lost-forever files whether you’re saving a few or many.

You need:

• The corrupt drive, SD card or storage device
• A new drive, available space on your computer or an online storage plan
• Data recovery software (I used Data Rescue 4 for Mac)
• So, so much patience

Get Ready

Do a little research on data recovery programs that will work for your needs. At $100, my selection was no cheap investment. If you’re saving images from a card, you can probably get away with a program that only looks for image files (JPG, PNG, TIF, etc) and that will save you a few bucks. If you have a more intense recovery planned, it’s worth splurging for software that promises to get the files you know you need. My pick — Data Rescue 4 — ensured that I would have the best chance at finding the many diverse file types trapped on my drive.

Because my drive would not mount when connected to my computer, it was imperative that I select a program that could recover from a non-mounting drive. Other programs may be able to do this as well, but I choose to pick one that mentioned the specific issue in its descriptions. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

Install your software, open it and follow prompts to connect your drive.

Recover

Carefully review the options available in your software. For my problem, a simple scan of the hard drive would do. I clicked through the necessary buttons (basically, “simple” and “go”) and left the computer sitting to run the scan. For the roughly 25GB of data on my drive, the scan took about half an hour. The “deep scan” setting said it would take about 2 days, but for my needs, the faster one did just fine. Depending on your data and program, this number can vary dramatically. Word of the wise: be patient. Rushing this process, while tempting, rarely pays off.

Once your scan has finished, your program will reveal a list of the found files. Select the ones you want to keep and choose a new home for them to be saved to. Viola — you’ve got your stuff back.

Panic Prevention

Having successfully saved a collection of priceless files, you might be wondering what you can do to never have to survive this hell again. Well, there are a few things:

• Get a new hard drive. Some IT gurus have told me that once a drive has failed, especially if it’s more than a few years old, it’s not the most trustworthy. It’s not complete trash, but definitely shouldn’t hold the ONLY copy of your files. Invest in a new drive for backups and transfers.
• Subscribe to a cloud. Cloud services can be hugely helpful for storage and backups. Some services come with an automatic backup option included. Others require you to commit files as you deem necessary. Weigh the cloud sizes, pricing and features to determine which most appropriately fits your needs.
• Get a little old school. Storage is storage and having a backup of your files, regardless of their format, is always a good idea. If a hard drive or cloud is not your style, consider burning completed files to a CD for saving and archiving with less fear for loss or corruption.

Considering the sheer value of the files included in my design archive, I will very much be abiding by the rule of a friend: backup the backup. Maintaining two copies of my archives and photo albums will be dramatically less stressful than having to worry through yet another recovery attempt.

This post originally appeared on Prettyography.

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