How To forum: How can I recover deleted files from my WD My Book Live ?

Thank you Kees, I will definitely check out those links if I need to recover the data from the damaged drive . . . but what I was hoping to do is restore deleted files from the My Book . . . which would save me a small fortune. Any hints?
Cheers
Lorraine

You can try the DIY titles mentioned in http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7588_102-354911/lost-and-found-or-the-storage-forum-sticky/

The professional data recovery companies, of course, could do that also, and it's much cheaper than if the drive is damaged.

If you want to do it yourself, it's very much recommended to make a full (sector by sector) clone of the original to an identical copy and work on that copy. That way, any changes done by recovery program A won't interfere with the logic of recovery program B.

Best of luck,


Kees

Thanks Kees, What you're saying makes sense and I would prefer a professional do it, so I might start with the My Book recovery first and check how much data I get back at a less painful cost than recovery from the damaged drive.

Cheers
Lorraine

If you honestly believed you smacked or broke the HD heads, then that h/w will preclude any saving of data and destroy further any "self-recovery" of data, no matter what method. You may get lucky and get something but also making sure the remaining data becomes even harder to recover. Real damage is only going to get worse and further, the recovery service of some co. uses other methods available to it for retrieving that data may not work as well or take longer. Data recovery service can only do so much but they have the full range of potential recovery tools. The service will still try a full retrieval of data even what you already done yourself, that's what you're paying for.

FYI- Now consider all the hassle you're doing now and use that as a learning experience to take the time and effort it takes to save your data and/or burn to CD/DVD/BD discs in the future of at least the super critical data before the major back-up or retrieval process.

tada -----Willy

Thanks Willy, Appreciate your advice . . at this stage I'm only trying to recover deleted files from a My Book. If I have to recover from the damaged external drive I'll definitely be sending to the white coats.

PS: The damaged drive WAS my backup . . . My original drive crashed and I was in the process of copying from the external drive when I had the accident. Doomsday was yesterday . . . . lol.

Google for the filename pci-filerecovery it may help. Sorry, for the late reply and name of file. -----Willy

Thanks Willy, that is very useful as I now have the My Book drive out of the box and isolated from the WD software and docked ready to connect to my laptop. I really do now need a good recovery program so this info is very helpful.
Cheers and have a merry Christmas . .
Lorraine