My backup drive failed while I was moving a folder of family photos off an old laptop. The drive started clicking, and 37 folders now show as empty even though the used-space total barely changed. I stopped touching it. What should I try next, and what data-loss lesson did you learn the hard way?
A clicking drive may well be physically failing, which means there’s no safe DIY fix. Power it down, don’t run CHKDSK, don’t copy anything to or from it, and definitely don’t keep plugging it in and out. If the photos are important, take it to a professional recovery lab; if that’s not an option, your best DIY option is to make a sector-by-sector copy of the drive to a new drive using something like ddrescue (or a similar utility), and run recovery software on the clone. (The fact that the used-space count was about the same suggests that the files themselves may still be present, even if the directory structure is not.) What you should learn from this is that copying files is not the same thing as backing them up; to do that, you need to copy the file to a new location, check that the copy is intact, and keep the original until you’ve made at least one good copy, preferably two (stored on different media, if possible).
That was less of a “backup went wrong” and more of “file transfer without any sort of safety net”. Moral of the story? Never “move” important irreplaceable files between disks, always copy, check a sample of the destination and then delete what you moved from the original place.
Shut down the old laptop as well, assuming that it still has the drive, don’t install any recovery software and save anything else on it. This laptop is perhaps your best bet at restoring files.
If the files were transferred from one to another separate drive, the computer would typically copy each file on the new drive and delete the old one after transferring in order to free space. If the laptop has a mechanical drive and hasn’t been used much since, the original, deleted files, might still be recoverable. An SSD is less likely to be a good candidate because of TRIM deleting data, but it is still worth preserving until you know what you have. Any recovery effort should be done by saving files on a third drive, never onto either source.
I agree with @matrixstream7426 that the transfer had no safety net, but I wouldn’t focus solely on the clicking drive. Treat both drives as evidence. Write down what happened, when the noise began, whether the transfer reported errors, and what has been connected or powered on since. That information can help a recovery technician decide which device offers the best odds. Avoid the freezer, tapping the enclosure, swapping random circuit boards, or opening the drive. Those tricks tend to turn a recoverable problem into a much more expensive one.
The general lesson to be learned is that, if you have options, always take the initiative to preserve them. Besides copying instead of moving, it is of great importance not to allow the original to be altered before you check and back up the destination. If something precious like photos gets lost, you would not risk only having one copy on your computer; you would make two backups, one on some external source and the other somewhere secure, maybe even offsite or in a trusted cloud. Having a flash drive right next to the computer may protect it from mechanical failure, but it will do nothing against burglary, fire, or a malicious deletion by accident or a failed synchronization that would erase everything.
The fact that the “used space” figure is unchanged is not surprising, it does not confirm anything. It could mean files are all there, but why are you so sure that the drive is not “occupied” in some other way? I would have expected the “occupied space” to be a marker that the files are all there. What if the drive is full of blocks marked as occupied, but the directory is corrupted?
I’d follow @nextlogic’s preservation advice, but expect recovery to be messy. You might get photos back without their original filenames, dates, or folder arrangement, and some may be incomplete.
The lesson to be learned here is that seeing these files appear on your backup drive is not sufficient. After copying the important photos, you need to disconnect the drive and then reconnect and open a random sampling to check that you actually can restore a folder from that point. Keep the original until this test and another copy has been made.
Cloning a clicking drive with ddrescue seems like such a brilliant idea, but every read attempt spins the failing heads and a bad read can ruin the platters in the middle of a clone. If those photos are really priceless, spending the cash on the imaging attempts at a lab is more worth it than a free shot you can only do once.
Losing downloaded files is an inconvenience; losing the only copies of family photos is a completely different calculation. I agree with @cyberrouter3323 that the value of the photos should decide whether you risk DIY imaging or pay for a lab.
Meanwhile, do not forget about the failing hard drive and the laptop. You should also check your old phones, camera memory cards, shared albums on social networks, photos on relatives’ computers, email attachments, messages, cloud storages, and other sources. This way you may find some lower resolution copies of the photos, but it will decrease the damage if the drive is lost.
The overall point is, you should not just back up one hard drive or do an inventory of one computer. It is essential to go through all the possible storage places for photos in your life. You never know where the primary copy and the only one left can be.