Recovered a backup of a lifetime
I got a brand new SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB on my birthday. My first idea? Finally I can move all the usually unused 350Gb of historical files from my 500Gb Macbook. All the photos and videos too important to store in cloud, all the tax documents, research papers from my Uni, PoC of my ideas and many many more. Basically, everything I don't really use daily, but way to important to remove and way to sensitive (and huge) to store in the cloud. I've happily formatted my new disk and moved everything I hold so dear there and went to sleep. Days passed by and at some point I decided to move some new photos and videos to the disk. I've sent files for the transfer in the background and went with my business. At some point l've checked the progress and was surprised that it's still going on, but I didn't think much of it. After some more time the process was still not finished. I tried ejecting the disk, but it didn't respond. So I decided, so there's probably a problem with the macbook and decided to reboot it. How surprised I was that after the reboot my macbook didn't see the disk anymore - you can imagine. I've checked the data cable, thought something happened to the laptop, the port, anything. But nothing helped. Then I started researching, found bunch of commands on the internet I could run in the terminal. They showing some partitions, something else, basically that the data is still there. But for some reason, I couldn't access it, since there's no "container" or something like that. After days of research, I found a bunch of people with the same issue, and eventually - a support article, saying that there might be a firmware issue in my revision of the disk. All I need to do is to reinstall the firmware, and the problem will be fixed. Installing the firmware will lead to a data loss though... At that point I was pretty pissed and depressed, thinking more and more, that I'll have to call the guys restoring data on the corrupted disks. The problem with that is - they are usually paid per GB restored (at least in my region). So I continued the research and finally found a solution - iBoysoft Data Recovery tool. Finally I found something, capable of seeing and listing all the "lost" files, everything so important personally and all the projects I didn't want to lose. It took some time, of course, till the end I wasn't sure it will work, but finally, it did. So the moral of the story: • update firmware anywhere, look for known issues before relying on anything • keep backups of backups • use NAS with proper RAID configured But if something goes sideways, use iBoysoft Data Recovery!