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I managed not to screw anything up, but I was handed a HDD from a friend of mine who is a burgeoning photographer. The drive has crashed, and I am afraid that, unless he coughs up several thousands of $$ for a professional recovery service, I am not going to be able to resurrect his drive. I’ve told him for at least a year not to spend the money and get a nas with a Raid set up. So, over Christmas, he did purchase one. But…too little too late for the portable drive. I always hate delivering bad news, but it is a hard lesson to learn. Usually, it just takes one time, and it’s back up city from there on out. Fortunately he has partial backups on SD chips, and files spread from FB to family phones he can recoup some of his losses from.

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Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Uggh, feel bad for them.

I’ve tried for years to get friends and family to have their data sit in a single point in the house and use backup services. That would be a massive improvement.

Family won’t listen, so I’m building minicomputers for them all that will handle it. Just have to configure their devices to store data there.

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- Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Just a friendly word of caution:
  
  if they don’t appreciate what you’re telling them to do, … and if the minis you’re building fail to do some magic data protection that they / you hadn’t thought about… it’ll be your “fault”
  
  They need to take some ownership
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh, agreed.
    
    There’s some other stuff at play with the minis (shared family photos, backup to each other, etc) that I’m going to use as an enticement to get them to learn to use these tools.
    
    Once they learn that, I can slip in some other things, piecemeal, depending on what each person clicks with.
    
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IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve had some luck with portable drives by removing the drive from enclosure and attaching it directly to sata-bus instead of USB. Also, as a general rule for anyone who might stumble on this, whenever attempting recovery at first create an image (I use ddrescue) and work with that. That way you’ll minimize risk of causing even more damage.

A while ago we “fixed” couple of hard drives with my brother. All of them had a single faulty diode, apparently it was a known failure point on those drives and brother found instructions online how to bypass that diode. Obviously that doesn’t really fix the drives, but a small piece of wire and some soldering was enough to get drives spinning again long enough that he could copy data over to new drives.

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- irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I’ve had some luck with portable drives by removing the drive from enclosure and attaching it directly to sata-bus instead of USB
  
  I did try removing it from the enclosure in hopes to hook it to a USB3.0 to IDE/SATA which also includes legacy stuff. However this drive (HD Passport) has the micro-b soldered onto the drive board. I’ve tried several different micro-b to whatever connections, but no joy. The drive won’t initialize and reports a fatal hardware error when I try. When initially plugged in, you can physically feel the platter spin momentarily, and the power light comes on. But the platter will stop spinning and the power light will start blinking on and off. This drive has been beat up, dropped, etc, in a camera gear bag. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t failed before now.
  
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  - IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If it tries to start but doesn’t do anything it’s pretty much a lost cause then as the drive gets power but fails to initialize. In theory a simple broken solder joint somewhere might cause that and that might be fixable, but that requires at least somewhat decent soldering station and some experience. Or maybe you could get a donor board and swap out memory chips from the old one, but that’s even more tricky. Hopefully it’s not too expensive lesson.
    
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shadshack@feddit.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You try the freezer trick? If not, put it in a plastic bag in the freezer for a few hours. The cold can make some things work a bit better and maybe for long enough to recover what you need. Doesn’t always work but it’s cheaper than professional data recovery.

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- irmadlad@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  You try the freezer trick?
  
  Actually, as a last resort, I vacuum packed in a freezer bag, and stuck it in this afternoon.
  
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