How to recover from a failed hard drive
There is a back story to this post. I had a Bad failure from an 11month old Seagate Storage NAS. Read that full story here.
If your here just to see how to get over a hard drive failure read on.
- First steps
- Recover
- Rebuild
- Backup
- Maintain routine
Recove
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Once you have fallen victim to a bad hard drive its possible all the data is not gone. You need to think about what can actually be salvaged from the drive. In my case I took the drives out from the NAS and put them aside. You need to look at the options for Data Recovery software.
Here are the ones I used.
TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software
PhotoRec PhotoRec Sorter moves each file into a new folder matching the name of the file extension (ex. JPEG, PDF, DOC)
PhotoRec Sorter To make sorting through the rescued files a bit easier I usually organized them by file type (.exe, .pdf, .doc. etc.)
I left them to run over night and some to finish the passes on the drives.
Rebuild
You will find with the Data Recovery Software will pull back files magically but without the original file names. A small price to pay for to getting the files back. You can use this software to separate the file formats into separate folders. To help sort and arrange what is and isn’t important.
Backup
Hopefully at this point you have more data back then you first lost. You need to build a Backup plan and stick to it so this doesn’t happen again. It is very easy these days to set up automatic backup routines.
Maintain routine
There are programs out there even within windows to backup. I use Cobian its open Source and does a great job.
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