Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Help with data recovery. Movie files showing as zero bytes. Advice please. (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I use a 16TB Western Digital drive for Plex storage, and movie files are starting to show as zero bytes. I thought this community could help. Some added details:

MacOS Sonoma running on M1 Mac Mini
Western Digital drive (exFAT) 16TB
Connected via USB-A
I have tried connecting the drive to another computer.. no luck
Ran the "first aid" program from disk utility. No luck.

Any suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

First of all you don't run things that irreversibly change the disk you're trying to recover data from (I mean before making a complete image of the disk). Second you shouldn't be trying to fix some exFAT file system with a Mac disk utility. Use a Windows machine and chkdsk. For good measure you can do a surface scan too, in case this is where your problems are coming from (HD Tune for example in Windows, badblocks in Linux, I'm sure Mac will have something too).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Use a Windows machine and chkdsk.

NEVER do that

For good measure you can do a surface scan too

yea, sure, kill it completely

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

NEVER do that

But what, run the mac something?! NOTE: everything I recommended is AFTER YOU MADE AN IMAGE OF THE DISK!

yea, sure, kill it completely

Well, if it's dead already how you can confirm it, at least to take out of circulation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

and what good would chkdsk do on the image?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I wasn't suggesting to run it on the image, just to have the image for reference before doing unpredictable things you can't undo, but if you want you can run it there too for a test (even better have a reflinked copy so you can play as much as you like). It'll just flag/correct if possible whatever inconsistencies you have in the filesystem, with its native tool. What's wrong with that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It'll just flag/correct if possible whatever inconsistencies you have in the filesystem, with its native tool.

Nothing wrong I guess, as long as you don't care about the data

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