How to recover a hard disk without formatting it (need emergency help) ?

[Anonymous]

My husband and I needed to transfer some pictures from my hard disk to his phone. I guess his phone could not bare a 2tb hard disk and it "crashed" the disk. Everytime we try to plug it into another device (like a macbook) it says that we need to format it. I really need some advices on how to save the data or how to avoid the formatting because I had literrally everything in that disk (pictures, college documents). It was obviously not very smart from me not having a backup of all these documents but I never knew it will crash because it is a very great hard disk...

So if Anybody has an idea, please help 🙏

Thank you.

[MrOracle]

Unfortunately, it's not likely to be something you can do yourself. You would probably need to contact a specialty hard drive recovery company such as Drive Savers (there are a few others too). This will NOT be cheap, no matter where you go, but know this: unless you are an expert who does hard drive recovery regularly, anything you do is likely to make it worse rather than better.

You must ALWAYS assume that anything and everything that you have on any physical drive (be in hard drive or SSDs/flash storage) can be lost forever at any time, and so you MUST back up your data, either to the cloud or to some kind of normally-offline storage, such as an external hard drive. And you must update your backups on a regular basis, because if your main drive dies, you will lose everything since your last backup.

And I cannot stress that this goes TRIPLE if your data is encrypted (and all modern smartphones come with encryption turned ON by default, which means that even data recovery people cannot recover your device's data - backups are your ONLY option!). Data that is encrypted is INTENTIONALLY DESIGNED to be lost forever if any part of the data is damaged or altered, but this means that you MUST make UNencrypted backups of this data in one form or another, or it's only a matter of time before you will suffer permanent data loss.

Most people have to learn this lesson the hard way. Don't be one of those people - learn from the pain of others and make sure you back up your data regularly. If you need any tips, you can ask questions here and I'll answer them as best I can.

[horatiohornblower]

Disclaimer: At home data recovery can increase damage and reduce chances of successful professional recovery. Gauge the importance of the information before trying it at home. As it is a gamble.

Try EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac. It's free to try to see what is recoverable but will cost money to actually recover anything over 2GB.

You will need another hard drive. You can't recover files to the same drive you are recovering from. That'll ruin the data. So, buy a blank drive to recover the files to. There's also going to be a lot of corrupt trash and duplicates. If the drive being recovered is 2TB. The drive you are recovering to should be 4TB or larger.

If the drive is making a scraping/scratching noise. Turn it off immediately and send it to a data recovery professional like Data Savers, LLC. Hope the disk surface isn't scratched up.

Don't use a local computers shop for data recovery. They don't know what they are doing. Use a specialist. A proper lab has a clean room for recoveries which require disassembly.

Finally, hopefully you get everything back. Set up a backup routine in the future. The simplest is to just pay a yearly fee for Backblaze. It'll back up your whole computer. That backup will be stored remotely. Since it is cloud based. You'll backup whenever you have an internet connection.

[caring__1]

You can take it to a computer geek, and they can use their recovery program to see what can be saved, or you can purchase your own program to do the same. This is the one I use: https://www.easeus.com/ad/data-recovery-software.html?linkid=ad-max&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIrfHQ3ITe_QIVUDKtBh2Knw2PEAAYASAAEgLO5vD_BwE

You can also go to windowsbbs. com and get recommendations for any computer problem for free.