Lost entire porn collection, recovery advice needed

6 years worth of collecting and cataloging, maybe 300 videos, 100 GB of my select porn, Im quite picky with what Ill actually save. Had it all backed up in 2 places. Here is my tale of woe:

Part 1. I kept it all on an external HD, Maxtor one touch. I was out of town for 1 year and put the ext HD in storage, climate controlled. When I returned the HD would light up but not function. I had a tech try and recover all the data off of it. He ran some recovery that took 15 hrs to run. A portion of the HD was recovered, some files do appear, but all the video files are unusable, all those files are corrupt. The tech told me the plates on the hd are bad and have simply failed. I am considering hiring another tech to try and recover the data. Is it even possible now ? Is the data possibly just gone and erased ? Very expensive ?

Part 2. I had alot ( 60 GB maybe) of my older porn from a few years ago on a HD retrieved from an old laptop. Everything on that HD appeared to have been recovered properly. EXCEPT the porn. I dont understand how its even possible !!! All other files are there. And only about 8 GB of the porn is there. But Im positive I had more on there. There are folders with some girls and just 1-2 are in there, when I know if I had 1-2 from that girl, then I had at least 4 more. It makes no sense. The only thing I can think is that I had the porn folder set as hidden and when it was recovered it only "found" some files. This is a huge wtf for me. What can I do with this drive to get the rest off of it ? Can select video files be erased somehow , not by me ????

Do any of you trust sending your drives out to get recovered ?

I now have about 35 videos in my collection and feel a strange loss without the rest. I spent so many hours downloading all of it. Any help is very appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Hello butow :
I have a Maxtor also_(not a onetouch I don't think)_older one maybe??
You have me worried_like I said an older one_it was in storage for 3 years (yikes)
_I must be lucky I had no climate control and it got very hot in there,
it still works so far,hope it does not die on me.
Anyway I know they are very sensitive while running_which I am sure you already know,
if bumped they can be damaged,anyway I do not know how to recover files from an external HardDrive although I have recovered files from my main hard drive using software called "recover my files" which I bought down at the local electronics outlet.maybe it will work,I don't know but maybe worth a try Good luck

bear

Thanks for answering.

After this has happened to me I certainly recommend having more than 1 backup. If you do have a Maxtor that is a few years old, spend $100 and get a new one. The hassle of losing years of work is easily worth it.

Anyway, it looks like it may cost up to $1000 for me to recover the files. A tech explained to me that the plates need to be rebuilt. I wont be spending that kind of money. After all , the entire collection I had was based off of the awesome fact that porn is free !!!! Spending 1k to recover it would negate that entire concept. I cant have that...

If I can only get the index without getting the files I would know what I had in there and can easily refind it all for download.

Anyone have any advice on how to get the file names off without the files ?

Doubt its possible with bad drive plates.

ty

My Toshiba PX1269E-1G50 just died on me, it was making clicking sounds. I thought the drive in it could be dead so I opened up the USB housing and removed the drive (Western Digital) from it. Attached the drive to external power from my pc, after which it powered up just fine, no clicking sounds anymore. Then put it on my external PATA/SATA USB interface and it ran just fine.
But the data was invisible, actually the whole partition was. I ran GetDataBack for NTFS (had it formatted as NTFS) and then could recover all data. But the strange thing is that this drive was supposed to encrypt the data on it and as far as I remember I did not remove that functionality from it. So, the actual encryption was nothing more than hiding all data on the drive.

In my case I was lucky that only the interface died and the clicking was just caused by this faulty interface.

How was your data trying to be recovered? Was the drive still in it's original USB housing? Can you try without the USB housing/interface? It seems strange that everything except your porn collection was recovered...

Was everything just as it was when you left, in other words: did no-one access your harddrives during your absence?

About four years ago, I lost 250gb of porn I had been collecting for years. The whole drive just packed up, and there was no way I could recover it. I have found some of those films and scenes since on the Internet, but most was lost.

I'm not really bothered. Time moves on and porn moves on. It's not long before the scene you adored two years ago now doesn't do much for you.

I'm always looking forward, never back. I hope the OP gets his hard-drive sorted.

alm,

The tech did format as NTFS and the files look like theyre actually there. It seemed to be a partial successful job. However none of the movies will play, nor are pictures visible. The files say they are there with complete data but they wont open. Music files work fine. Other data was extracted fine. Just not the stuff I actually need. Yes the drive was removed from the casing, its just a bare hd now. This is all regarding the external drive that had all the porn.

Now the 2nd drive from my old laptop is the one that is mind baffling. I had porn files set as hidden, when the drive was recovered onto my new external, only 1/3 of my porn is there. Makes no fucking sense man. Theres no way Id have 1 or 2 vids of one girl without having all of her in there. It should be all or none. Its like it just recovered some weird random sample of my porn. But all other stuff on the drive is perfect. No one ever had access to this drive ever.

Abby,

Yeah man, I pretty much have given up at this point. I can shell out $1000 usd and see if they can rebuild the plates, which is where this is at now, talked to other experts on this. But srsly fuck that. Porn is free. It pains me to let go some of the awesome scenes I scoured the earth for and enjoyed to their fullest potential !!! But wtf can I do. Just move on for now, and keep the drives, maybe recover them at other point.



thx all

last year i got sick of having way too much porn on my computer it was about 1TB of clips and films. most were not in HD since most were in my collection since 2002 but they was a lot of classic good stuff. I notice that out of all the files i had i only watched about 3% over and over and the rest was just sat there taking up space. So after a full format i decided to start over and i must say i got most of my favorite clips back in a matter of days and weeks.

Sometimes it is good to restart over, its not like your favorite clips will never be available to download again. I now would rather have a small folder with a few gigs of quality porn that i love and can bash one out then have an hard drives full and running out of space of porn i dont view.

Dont get me wrong i can see why people like to have loads of TB of porn because they might like to share. I also use to share a lot with the likes of rapidshare so i could get my free accounts by racking up points. But after rapidshare went down hill afew years ago i just decided to keep my collection small for the time being.

I hear you man. And I agree with you ... mostly. I have a few favorites that I feel like I "must" have.

My problem is, at this point, I have no file names or anything. Just some vague memories, lololol. Feels very weird to simply not have those "go to" scenes anymore. Eh, its fine though. Im just going to rebuild a new group of favorites. One day Im sure Ill shell out some cash and just get the drive recovered. Till then , Im sure Ill make do.

Have you ever heard of Gibson SpinRite? You might try that as the program is not terribly expensive.

Damn, I feel for you man. Few years ago I plugged the wrong power to my external hard drive since I had different makes. It burned out. Cost me like, 150 US to get the contents copied over from a 250 gig hard drive. Now I keep two external copies of everything... Had a 2 Terabyte fail on me in recent months...