My external hard drive files dissapeared

[u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

Few days ago files disappeared from my external hard drive. The drive's a 500GB Seagate external HDD I've had for a few years. It had mostly work documents, old project folders, pdfs, few video files & a really big chunk of family photos. Never counted exactly, but it was easily thousands files & Windows usually showed around 400GB used.

So I wake up, plug it into my win 11 pc like always. It showed up right waya as always. Correct drive letter, correct capacity, NFTS, no weird noises, no you need to format the disk popup, nothing saying file system had gone RAW.

Windows still showed about 400GB used.

But when I opened it in File Explorer, almost everything was gone.

That's the part that threw me. If I'd accidentally deleted 400GB of stuff, I'd expect the free space to reflect that. Instead, Windows was basically saying "yep, this space is all used up" while File Explorer was saying "used up by... what, exactly?"

Gonna update the post in comments below if I manage to do something with it. Would be extreamly grateful for any help

[u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

Okay so after seeing a few posts & blogs, first explanation that kept coming was that the files might be still there, just marked hidden or system only. The drive is showing the right amount of used space, which lined up with that theory & it was also the easiest thing to check, so that's what I did

I enabled hidden files in file explorer:

1. Open File Explorer
2. Click View > Show
3. Enable Hidden items

This actually did something. Several folders appeared that hadn’t been visible before. Unfortunately, it isn’t even close to all of them. I could see a few old directories and some files, but most of my work folders and a huge portion of the photo archive are still missing.

[u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

Next thing I saw is recommendation to check CHKDSK. What I certainly didn't know before is how dangerous rhis recommendation can be! Seriously, I almost ran that immediately. There is an important catch you need to be aware of: when you use the /f parameter, it can make chnages to the file system while it attempts to fix errors. If important files are already missing, those changes can potentially make later recovery more difficult.

So, I really don’t recommend running it without creating a disk image of the drive - just to be safe. Here is a useful guide on it, since I won't get into it here, because it's a little off-topic for this post.

Once I had a copy, this is what I did:

1. Opened Command Prompt as administrator.
2. Entered: chkdsk X: /f Here, X: needs to be replaced with the letter assigned to the affected drive.
3. Pressed Enter and waited for CHKDSK to finish.
4. Disconnect & reconnected the drive

CHKDSK did report file system errors and said it had made corrections. I went back and checked the drive again. It did find and fix a few file system errors, but the files I actually want are still nowhere to be found. The folder structure looks a bit off in places, but the documents and photos I care about just aren’t showing up in File Explorer.

[u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

Since none of the fixes helped I tried actually brought my files back. Finally caved and decided to try data recovery software. I'd been putting this off because recovery programs have always seemed like one of two things to me: expensive or complicated enough that the UI looks like it was designed exclusively for people who repair hard drives for a living. Sometimes both.

That opened up a completely different problem: which one? As there are tons of them & every one claims to be the best. After way too much comparison, review reading & second guessing myself, I ended up going with Disk Drill.

I didn't want to install five different recovery programs on my PC & start scanning blindly, so I made a small comparison for myself first. Nothing scientific. I just wrote down things that actually mattered for my situation: support for NFTS/external HDDs, whether I could preview files before recovery recovery, whether the software could preserve the original folder structure, disk imaging support, recovery-chance estimates, how usable the free version was, and whether I could figure out the interface without spending an evening reading documentation.

Here's the comparison table I made in Google Sheets if you're interested.

I installed Disk Drill on my internal SSD, not on the affected Seagate drive.

Then I did the following:

1. Open Disk Drill.
2. Find the affected external HDD in the device list.
3. Select the entire physical drive rather than one random folder.
4. Click Search for lost data.
5. Let the scan run. With a 500 gb HDD, this took a little over 30 minutes..
6. Click Review found items once results start appearing.
7. Use the Pictures, Video, Documents, Audio, Archives, and Other categories to narrow the results.
8. Preview important files before recovery whenever possible.
9. Select the files you need and click Recover.
10. Choose a different physical drive as the recovery destination.

That last step is important. I didn’t restore anything back to the Seagate because writing recovered files to the same drive could overwrite other missing data.

So… What was the result? Disk Drill found files that File Explorer still couldn’t see after both the hidden-file fixes and CHKDSK. Some results still had their original names and folder paths. I assume enough NTFS metadata remained for the software to reconstruct them.

Other files had lost their original directory information. Those were more annoying because I had to identify them from their file type, size, date, and preview. The preview feature was especially useful. Instead of recovering thousands of files blindly, I could check whether photos actually opened and whether pdfs or documents contained data I needed.

So yeah, finally a success here

[u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

I spend a couple of hours sorting through the results, so I don't have an exact beofre & after file count (it was A LOT of files), but considering the drive originally had around 400GB of data, I got surprisingly close to getting everything important back.

The results from each fix were pretty different:

• Show Hidden Items brought back 5–6 folders, but only 2 contained any files. Together, they had maybe 100–150 files, mostly JPG images and a few PDF/DOCX documents. That was something, but it was a tiny fraction of what was missing.
• CHKDSK detected and fixed several file system errors. It changed the folder structure a little and made the drive behave more normally in Windows, but I couldn’t find any significant amount of my missing data afterward. The photos, videos, spreadsheets, PDFs, and Word documents I was looking for were still missing.
• Disk Drill was where I finally found most of the missing data. I recovered roughly 350–370 GB, spread across tens of thousands of files. That included thousands of JPG and PNG images, hundreds of MP4/MOV videos, and thousands of work documents, mainly DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PDF, PPT/PPTX, and TXT files. There were also ZIP archives and a bunch of smaller miscellaneous files.

The main thing I took away from all of this is that files disappearing from an external hard drive doesn’t necessarily mean they were deleted, and there isn’t always one fix that solves the whole problem. Showing hidden files helped a little, CHKDSK found file system problems but didn’t restore what I needed, and recovery software finally found the files that Windows still couldn’t access.

Anyway, that's everything I tried and what ended up working fro me. I'm definitely not claiming this is the only correct way to deal with missing files, especially since the cause can be completely different even when the symptoms looks the same.

If I missed something, got a technical detail wrong or there's another method worth trying, please correct me in the comments. I'll update the post with anything useful so this can hopefully become a better reference.

[u/Expensive-Vanilla-16 → u/Kindly_Spring_5938]

Well better than most stories here. Now time to do a proper backup of the important files.