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Resolved Question

Lost pictures from external seagate drive

Aug 12, 2017 8:10AM PDT

I'm on vacation. I brought my laptop and an external drive mainly to download pictures. I was taking my external drive and attaching it to a USB port on the Samsung DVD player here to show pictures on a slide show. When I did that all the pictures were on the drive. Then I put the drive back on my laptop to load more pictures onto it -and 150 pictures from yesterday disappeared from the drive. All the pictures were only loaded earlier in the same day. The rest of the drive seems to be okay. I have not loaded anything else onto the external since I noticed the problem. I was able to recover some pictures with a recovery program that took deleted pictures off the camera card. I'll have more time when I get back home to figure out how to get them back - if possible. But if anyone else has any ideas so I don't screw up anything before I make any attempts, I would appreciate it. (and if anyone has any idea what might have caused these pictures to disappear, I am curious, since I had done nothing but take the drive out of the DVD player USB port and put it into my computer USB port. (And if it matters - using WIndows 10 64 bit)

Thanks in advance

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binaryguy1101 has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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While this is all about backups.
Aug 12, 2017 8:18AM PDT

I like RECUVA since it won't write to that drive and possibly overwrite what you can't lose.

Again, if you write to the drive, the chances of getting files back goes down.

As to your question if this happens to others, yes it does.

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It worked
Aug 12, 2017 6:45PM PDT

I tried Recuva (twice). The first time it didn't work (Maybe I did something wrong). But it took 13 hours to go through the drive and found no files. I changed the settings to look for pictures, and it took another 13 hours, but it found all the missing pictures. Thank you for that suggestion.

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Answer
Maybe...
Aug 12, 2017 9:56AM PDT

the images are actually on the external HDD and you just misplaced or don't remember exactly where you copied them to. Also, if you copied the files over and there were files already with the same file names, hopefully you'd get a warning and not do that.

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Answer
Pics
Aug 12, 2017 10:51AM PDT

If those pics are important get another ext hdd and clone the original hdd to it.

Now you can try to recover the pics and if it turns into a mess nothing is lost as you have a complete copy.

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thanks
Aug 12, 2017 1:31PM PDT

I made a complete backup of the drive before this vacation, so the only things new on the drive are the pictures I took on this trip. And all the new pictures were on the drive - i know because we were watching a slide show of them. And some (and only some) of the picture have disappeared. The pictures are still named as the camera named them, so I can tell how many are missing. The last picture I have is img_9156.jpg, and the first one on my camera is img_9472.jpg . doing the math, I can see that 316 pictures have disappeared. By using CardRecovery software, I was able to recover 126 pictures from the Camera's SD Card. But I was still wondering what could have happened to my external drive to cause this disappearance - or if there is a way for me to recover them. I still have a couple of hours to wait until Recuva is finished with a deep scan. I don't think that will solve the problem, because I ran it last night. Right now it is in Stage 1 of 3 - Current progress 82%. 121152 file(s) found. But when it ran last night, there were no files that came up in the recovery panel.

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Answer
what i found odd was
Aug 12, 2017 12:09PM PDT

I have been copying hundreds of pictures to the same directory all week. These files were on the External disk - because we were observing them on the big television. I brought the External drive back to the computer to copy some more files to the drive, and I was told that I couldn't copy any files . At first, I assumed that here was something amiss with the SD card, but then I noticed that pictures that I had only copied earlier in the day were missing (But not all of them). I stopped doing anything because I knew that if I copied any files to the drive, I might overwrite something. Since I am on vacation, and don't have the resources to figure this out right now, I thought I might get some insight before I get home. So thanks for all the replies. I am running RECUVA in the background right now. I ran a deep scan last night, and it found nothing, I changed the setting to look for pictures and am doing another deep scan - I've got another three hours to go before I know anything.
thans again

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a single directory of many files
Aug 12, 2017 8:53PM PDT
"I have been copying hundreds of pictures to the same directory all week."

https://superuser.com/questions/446282/max-files-per-directory-on-ntfs-vol-vs-fat32

FAT32

Maximum disk size: 2 terabytes
Maximum file size: 4 gigabytes
Maximum number of files on disk: 268,435,437
Maximum number of files in a single folder: 65,534

NTFS:

Maximum disk size: 256 terabytes
Maximum file size: 256 terabytes
Maximum number of files on disk: 4,294,967,295
Maximum number of files in a single folder: 4,294,967,295