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When your external hard drive crashes then what you need to do in order to retrieve your date will depend on whether it is still mechanically working or not. Data recovery from crashed external hard drive is tricky, yet with luck, the drive will be working, but the data index may still be lost.
You’ll have to check this first of all by attaching it to your PC and seeing if the computer recognizes the hard drive or not. If your PC does recognize the external hard drive, but doesn’t show any data on it then follow the advice under Software Data recovery from crashed external hard drive section.
However, if your hard drive is not recognized by the computer, then you can try taking it out of its case and manually attaching it to your PC. Now you can check again to see if the hard drive is recognized or not. If it is, and you see all of you data still intact, then the likely problem is with the power supply for your external drive. However, if the drive appears to be dead, then you will need to read further in the Lab Data recovery from crashed external hard drive section.
In the case of a logical failure, for instance when the data has been corrupted by the Master File Table, or MFT, your data is still saved somewhere on the hard drive, but the index for it is not there. In this case, the data is usually quite easily retrieved.
You will need to get yourself another hard drive that has the same capacity or more as the damaged hard drive, plus you will need some data recovery software. Data Recovery Pro, GetBackData and ParetoLogic are all good ones you can try, costing between $49.99 and $199. Alternatively, you can try a free data recovery tool downloaded from the internet, such as Recuva.
If you’re not too sure about doing it yourself, then you should outsource this job to someone who has a bit more experience with computers. The actual data recovery process may take several days to complete, depending on the size of your hard drive, and so the recovering computer needs to be left on during this time. There is a good chance that you will be able to recover all of your data, or at least a big part of it. If the MFT index is not reconstructed, you will still recover your data, however it will be in individual files with no folder structure.
If your external hard drive is not working at all, then you shouldn’t attempt to fix it yourself. Never open up a hard drive unless you know what you are doing, or you will risk losing your date forever. You will need to contact a specialized data recovery from crashed external hard drive lab in order to get them to do it for you.
Of course the easiest option is to prevent the need for data recovery in the first place! You can do this by regularly backing up all of your data on another drive, as the chances of both of them breaking down at exactly the same time are very remote.
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