My external hard drive that had close to four years of family photos and some old work files on it suddenly stopped showing up properly on my laptop last week, when it did connect the drive letter would appear briefly then disappear again within a few seconds, and running a basic check showed the file system itself had gotten corrupted somehow. Have not managed to recover much off it yet despite trying a couple of free recovery tools, which apparently only pulled back a small fraction of what was actually on there.
The genuinely frustrating part is that this drive was supposed to be my backup in the first place, most of those photos existed nowhere else since I had gotten complacent over the years and stopped bothering to also keep a copy on the laptop itself once I moved everything onto the external drive to free up space. Realizing now that having exactly one copy of anything, even on a dedicated backup drive, was never actually a real backup strategy to begin with.
Took the drive to a local data recovery place near Ameerpet just to get a quote, they mentioned it might be a physical issue with the drive rather than pure software corruption, and recovery would cost a fair amount with no actual guarantee of getting everything back intact even after paying.
Have started looking into cloud storage options now as an additional layer going forward, alongside maybe a second physical drive kept somewhere else entirely rather than sitting next to the first one on the same desk, though the ongoing subscription cost for enough cloud storage to hold everything properly is more than I initially expected it to be.
Has anyone actually dealt with a drive failure like this and found a recovery approach that genuinely worked without costing a small fortune? Also curious what backup setup people here are actually using day to day rather than just intending to set up properly at some point.