Hard Disk Data Loss Recovery and Importance of Online Backup

Background:

Recently I lost all my data due to hard disk failure. I knew that HDD could fail so I backed up in another external HDD, but the unthinkable happened. Both of them failed before backing up elsewhere. After my laptop HDD failure I was able to copy most of my data to the external HDD. Then trying to backup data to my desktop somehow the external completely failed. There is a high chance the problem is with the enclosure of the external HDD. Replacing it could solve the problem.

I did not have online backups of my data as I always thought two separate things won't fail at the same time. I have replaced the internal HDD with an SSD and recovered a very very small portion of my data from the internal HDD.

Some Recovery Tips:

1. Buy an external HDD enclosure and put the internal laptop HDD usually 2.5 inch inside it. Now the laptop internal HDD can be used as an external HDD.

2. Then connect using the enclosure USB.

3. Do not run ntfs-fix or badblocks commands from linux. I think running this command made documents of one of my partition inaccessible.

4. After connecting USB cable in windows wait for the drives to show up. Depending on the damage of HDD it may take a lot of time for some drives to show up.

5. Some drives may not be accessible and may give cyclic redundancy error. Run CHKDSK DriveLetter: /F or, CHKDSK DriveLetter: /R

6. Run with the F flag first as it will take less time. If that doesn't do it run with R flag.

7. Copy whatever can be copied from accessible drives.

8. If CHKDSK doesn't work use various cloning or, recovery software's available.

This blog primarily serves as my online notes. Many times I forget things and come search them here. From now on I will upload codes and other things that I can here, but I may not have enough time to comment or make a tutorial about them.