Files vanished from external hard drive for no reason. Anything I can do about this?

Asked May 05 '17 at 15:45

Active May 05 '17 at 15:45

Viewed 27 times

I had some data backed up onto an external hard drive, and it seemed fine. When I reopened the folder a few minutes later, there were only two files left instead of hundreds.

I can't think of anything I was doing that might have caused this. I wasn't formatting or deleting anything, I wasn't doing anything to file systems, I wasn't doing anything that might have caused this.

The two files left are the two most recently edited.

find and locate commands don't show them anywhere else. Well, sorta: /home/user/.local/share/Trash/files/ contains all the directories, but they're all empty.

Is it hopeless? Is there anything I can do?

asked May 05 '17 at 15:45

Grund

What is your hard drive file system? is it NTFS? – Ravexina May 05 '17 at 15:48
Yeah, it's NTFS – Grund May 05 '17 at 16:11
Check the free space of the hard drive, does it seems that your data is still there? or it's look like disk is almost free? if the first one is the case, connect your hard disk to a windows machine an run a chkdisk. – Ravexina May 05 '17 at 16:13
That wouldn't be indicative. I use the hard drive for bulk storage, and the missing files are only txt files, take up very little room. – Grund May 05 '17 at 16:15
Anyway, if it's possible for you give windows chkdisk a shot ;) – Ravexina May 05 '17 at 16:17
Is the command simply chkdsk? Or are there flags? – Grund May 05 '17 at 16:20
here. – Ravexina May 05 '17 at 16:26
Thanks. They accidentally posted a picture in section 8 in German – Grund May 05 '17 at 16:29
You are welcome ;). typical Microsoft :) – Ravexina May 05 '17 at 16:30
Your drive may be mounted read-only. How did you mount the drive? Is this NTFS drive/partition the C: drive under Windows, or something else? – heynnema May 05 '17 at 18:59
It mounted automatically when I plugged it in. Is it possible that the files are there, but hidden. (By the way, ls of that folder doesn't show the missing files.) – Grund May 06 '17 at 07:24

Files vanished from external hard drive for no reason. Anything I can do about this?

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