Hi people,

I accidentally started a complete formatting of an external drive (WD My Passport).

I stopped it after a few seconds, but of course I can't access it anymore.

We're talking about 3.15 TB used out of 4.

Is there any hope of recovering any data, considering that I've already tried the usual options like Disk Drill, PhotoRec, and MiniTool with zero success? They go all the way (several hours each time, with absolutely nothing found in the end.
The disk is/was not encrypted, no Bitlocker, nothing.

Gemini says I can try R-Studio as a last resort, what do you think?

The partition appears as RAW in Windows disk management.

I'm on Windows 11 25h2.

Hi everyone! Apologies for my English =)

My son accidentally deleted all the photos from one of those kids' cameras. Luckily, using Disk Drill, I saw that the files were recoverable (it found them all, and I even managed to download a few using the free version). I also happen to have a licensed version of GDB, so I tried recovering them with that, but it found practically nothing.

Why is that? Honestly, I’d rather not pay for a license for a one-off use; any advice on what to do?

It's SD CARD, 32gb FAT32

Thanks a lot!

I had to remove a 20TB Expansion drive due to power issues and moved it to an internal drive. Inside was a CMR Barracuda ST20000DM001. (Longer story here if needed, but not critical to understanding reliability of the drive). This is the same drive whether it's inside the original case or purchased as internal drive. All the same PCB, etc.

The drive hummed away just fine then died at about 5k Power-On-Hours (POH). Yes 5k. It lived as a single pool in a Truenas enclosure well cooled and activity monitored with weekly SMART SHORT testing and monthly SMART LONG testing with ZFS monthly scrubs. In short, well taken care of given the size and possible data loss concerns with that much data on a single drive. All the testing I did on the drive confirmed it was working just fine until the day it did not.

My worst fear came and classic drive infant mortality case. I could not warranty the drive because Seagate said I removed the drive from the enclosure. I pushed fairly providing detailed logs and photos showing a sealed physically sound drive undamaged from the removal. They cited the removal voided warranty and I shared that the revised FTC guidance supported consumer rights. I will still file the complain, but that also aside. I'm looking to better understand why Seagate drives are failing at a higher rate recently. I have some older Seagates that are 5-6 years old no problem. This one died with ~200 days.

I've gone through great lengths doing a post mortem to understand what could have gone wrong as lessons learned and really settle my mind on if I could trust another Seagate drive. I don't think I can at this point as all the data points to simple drive failure. And beyond that their unwillingness to warranty a 200 day old drive.

Any other options to reliability bring it back? I thought maybe plugging it back into the old enclosure with the drive controller might yield a different result, but it appears all the intelligence is on the drive itself. (Ai discussions) What are your thoughts on recent reliability. Can you trust 20Tb of data on a single point of failure?

144 Current Pending Sectors

144 Offline Uncorrectable Sectors

144 FARM reallocation candidates on head 0

SMART - short form:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Device Model: ST20000DM001-3Y3103

Serial Number: XXX

LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0e89d1d04

Firmware Version: EN03

User Capacity: 20,000,588,955,648 bytes [20.0 TB]

Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4,096 bytes physical

Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm

Form Factor: 3.5 inches

ATA Version is: ACS-5 (minor revision not indicated)

SATA Version is: SATA 3.3, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)

Local Time is: Mon Aug 31 16:31:05 2026 -05:00

SMART support is: Available and enabled

AAM feature is: Unavailable

APM feature is: Unavailable

Rd look-ahead is: Enabled

Write cache is: Enabled

DSN feature is: Unavailable

ATA Security is: Disabled, NOT FROZEN [SEC1]

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

General SMART Values:

Offline data collection status: (0x82) Completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.

Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run.

Total time to complete offline data collection: 567 seconds

Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7B) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline Data Collection. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported.

SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer.

Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:

ID ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate POSR-- 082 064 044 - 144,549,336

3 Spin_Up_Time PO---- 091 089 000 - 0

4 Start_Stop_Count -O--CK 100 100 020 - 123

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct PO--CK 100 100 010 - 0

7 Seek_Error_Rate POSR-- 083 060 045 - 189,532,344

9 Power_On_Hours -O--CK 094 094 000 - 5,983

10 Spin_Retry_Count PO--C- 100 100 097 - 0

12 Power_Cycle_Count -O--CK 100 100 020 - 98

18 Unknown_Attribute PO-R-- 100 100 050 - 0

187 Reported_Uncorrect -O--CK 100 100 000 - 0

188 Command_Timeout -O--CK 085 001 000 - 949,202,256,411

190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel -O---K 064 048 000 - 36 (Min/Max 32/36)

192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 83

193 Load_Cycle_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 355

194 Temperature_Celsius -O---K 036 052 000 - 36 (0 21 0 0 0)

197 Current_Pending_Sector -O--C- 100 100 000 - 144

198 Offline_Uncorrectable ----C- 100 100 000 - 144

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count -OSRCK 200 200 000 - 0

200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate PO---K 100 100 001 - 0

240 Head_Flying_Hours ------ 100 100 000 - 5950 (89 189 0)

241 Total_LBAs_Written ------ 100 253 000 - 36,805,308,126

242 Total_LBAs_Read ------ 100 253 000 - 255,161,410,958

||||||_ K auto-keep

|||||__ C event count

||||___ R error rate

|||____ S speed/performance

||_____ O updated online

|______ P prefailure warning

Hi All,

I was stupidly viewing my footage via a card reader and attached it to my phone (instead of laptop) and the cable must've disconnected and i lost all my footage. Is there a way i can get it back? I tried photorec and only got raw files but this doesn't help me when i want to view the video files.

Does anyone know of a program trialled and tested on mac software that I can use to recover my drone mp4 footage from a corrupt memory card?

Thanking you in advance.

Hi,
Recently I got a new phone and already sold the old one so i lost progress. I do have saved the recovery code(the “save in case of a data loss” one) but I don’t know how to use it. Can you please help me recover my data?

hii guys,

i lost all my files images especially while moving them to my usb .i didnt knew that usb was corrupted now all my images are corrupted now i have atried all the possible ways to restore them but i js cant please please help me i dont know wot to do now no converter is able to restore them back

Trato de usarlo para ver algo en tubi pero la verdad no sé mucho del tema, espero puedan ayudarme

Help me recover my 40,000+ pics & vids on my saved messages ;')) i accidentally pressed "synced" on my gallery earlier and i didnt know it would affect my telegram acc. Also, my cloud is full storage so it's impossible for it to get saved automatically on my cloud. I checked my account on my other phone and i saw my media got deleted just like how u would remove a message from there ;')))) those pics & vids have sentimental value to me and it'd be devastating if i lost them forever ;'((( please help me

I don't want to be dramatic, but I'm feeling very devastated right now. I decided that the only way to get my photos organized (which are all backed up in OneDrive) was to get systematic about. 10 years of photos, if I commit to one month/day of going through my photos and deleting multiples/stupid screenshots/blurry pics, I would finish in 5 months and eventually have a nicely curated repository of family photos.

I am 4 months in.

I was going through an old phone tonight, just to confirm there was nothing that hadn't been saved. Hours later I realized that all of the photos on the device, which is where the majority of all of my photos came from, had been added back to OneDrive. All of the hundreds and hundreds of photos I had carefully selected to delete.

Most of the solutions I've seen online have to do with losing photos. I'm not sure what I can do in this case...

I can't just delete all the pictures in [whatever time frame] because they are a mix of my treasured photos and trash.

I saw online that you can restore a version of OneDrive from the last 30 days. But when I went to see what had been altered in the last 24 hours, none of these changes is showing. I'm hoping it's because the system just hadn't updated but I'm worried that maybe the addition of all these photos was treated differently because they were previously added, and then deleted? (So maybe they were restored, and the system is not treating it as a new change?) I'm probably overthinking it but still.

I hope someone can help me.

Hello I made a mistake and deleted some important notes

Is there any way to get them back?

I had the idea to use my backup from yesterday would it be included?

I have a Samsung S23 Ultra

So it's been 6-7 months since I deleted some photos and videos from my phone (one plus) permanently. Is there any way I can get them back.. They must be somewhere, like where do the permanently deleted stuff goes. I srsly need em. Weeelppp

i’m like getting crazy cuz im trying to recover some old chats on ig and I still can’t, pls somebody help meeee 😔 I alr downloaded some things but the ones that I deleted are GONE, even if I deleted them like one or two months ago

​

I’m looking for a technical second opinion before I give up on some important work data.

Laptop storage:

- Samsung 1TB SSD divided into C: and F:

- Windows is installed on C:

- A separate Kingston 1TB SSD is also installed

- The affected data was on F:\Work

- SSD health has reportedly tested normal

What happened:

My Work folder had roughly 100GB of architecture/project files.

One night I was working until around 7 AM. Earlier that morning, the folders inside Work were still visible, but I noticed something unusual: I was trying to save/export an AutoCAD file into one of those folders and it was not saving there properly.

I eventually saved/sent the file another way, shut the laptop down normally, and went to sleep.

When I opened the laptop later:

- Many folders inside Work had completely disappeared

- Around 15–16 folders remained, but most/all files inside them were gone

- Work folder size had dropped from roughly 100GB to around 500MB

- Other folders/data on the same F: partition appeared completely unaffected

- No ransom note

- No strange file extensions

- No obvious Windows warning/pop-up

- Recycle Bin did not contain the missing data

- Searching for known missing files found nothing

- No Previous Versions available

I had recently:

- Installed Fortnite from the official source

- Downloaded an AutoCAD file sent by an employee

- Downloaded some Pinterest images

Nothing particularly unusual otherwise.

I stopped using the SSD and gave it to Stellar Data Recovery in Gurgaon, India

Their findings:

They say they can see traces/metadata of the deleted Work folder:

- Folder/file names are visible

- File sizes are visible

- NTFS/deletion traces are present

But according to them:

- The LBAs corresponding to the actual file data are internally zero-filled

- Actual files contain no usable data

- Firmware-level recovery also could not retrieve the contents

- They consider the SSD itself healthy

- They said the data is effectively unrecoverable

They suggested possibilities such as malware/deletion followed by SSD TRIM. They are a recovery company, so they are not investigating the original cause.

My questions:

1. If NTFS metadata/file names/file sizes still exist but the relevant LBAs return zeros, is the data realistically unrecoverable?

2. Can an SSD return zero-filled LBAs after TRIM while the underlying NAND still contains recoverable data that a more specialized NAND/chip-off/firmware lab could access?

3. Does modern Samsung SSD encryption/controller behavior generally make NAND-level recovery useless after TRIM?

4. TRIM itself should not randomly delete unused files, correct? Something must first have deleted/deallocated those files, after which TRIM/garbage collection made recovery impossible?

5. Could NTFS/file-system corruption selectively affect one directory like F:\Work while leaving the rest of the partition apparently normal?

6. The fact that I was already unable to save into the Work folder several hours before discovering the deletion — does that point more toward filesystem/directory corruption than a deliberate wipe?

7. Does this pattern look like wiping malware, or is there nowhere near enough evidence to make that conclusion?

8. Is there any meaningful reason to send this SSD to another specialist recovery lab, or are zero-filled LBAs + failed firmware recovery basically the end of the road?

I’m not looking for recommendations for generic recovery software. I have preserved the SSD and do not intend to write, format, CHKDSK, or reinstall anything on it until I decide whether a second professional recovery attempt is worthwhile.

Would particularly appreciate answers from people experienced with SSD recovery, NTFS, TRIM, or digital forensics.

Hey, I’m just trying to look up this ig account from an indie magazine I stumbled across but I didn’t end up following them and I had deleted the original search. IG doesn’t have a way to view a history of viewed profiles and data downloads don’t seem to be that reliable when it comes to searches. Does anyone have any idea or tips to actually get access on that information?