Recovery of Files (possible indexing error)

[Justin Brooks]

My son accidentally unplugged my external HDD. Windows 10 said there were problems with the drive and offered to fix them and I got a message saying the issues were repaired. CrystalDiskInfo seems to report that there are no physical problems with the drive itself however I noticed a couple thousand files were missing. I use Crashplan so it shows the exact date and time that they were "deleted" from the scheduled backup so I know exactly which files are missing. Before you ask, Crashplan is unable to scan and replace only the missing files. You have to go in and select each one from hundreds of directories as the files were deleted at random. Obviously this would take hours and hours of comparing the log file and drilling through the directories and selecting the needed files. Doing a full back-up of everything at the proper restore point would replace the missing files but also overwrite existing ones which would be okay but it would take weeks because of the size of my archive and internet speed.

I have a hunch that there is simply an indexing error and all of the files are still on the drive. I can't be sure but the space left on the drive does not seem to have gone up (as we are talking GBs of data) so that is why I think that they may not be gone entirely. I was hoping that there is a tool that scan and repair the indexes and hopefully restore the files to their proper location. I read about using chkdsk but it made it seem like I would have to manually edit each file if it was able to recover them and so obviously that is not feasible.

Any ideas?

[rogfanther]

I don´t know this CrashPlan software, so cannot advise on that, but if it is some kind of backup software, then maybe it has some option to restore only the inexistent files when restoring a backup ?

Other than that, after you ran chkdsk when win10 asked, it would probably have fixed any problems, or deleted some inconsistent data about your files. When the disk was unplugged, was there some writing operation occurring to the disk ?

[scratchy]

Check shadow copies or previous versions of folders

[RolandJS]

Guys, Gals, is there some way a utility such as FreeFileSync could be used in this situation?

"My son accidentally unplugged my external HDD." Have you found a way to prevent such an accident from happening again? You're going to do a lot of work to recover from this past accident.

[Justin Brooks]

FreeFileSync is what? a backup software? i have cloud backup which is why i can regain the files even though it will probably take a dozen hours of work. i'm just looking for something to easily recover them as i believe they are still on the disk, just not indexed.

it looks like i may not be able to. so, last question: let's say i recover them via Crashplan but my disk space still shows they are there but not showing up. what utility would clear that disk space of those (unindexed? shadow?) files? defragmenter?

[RolandJS]

"FreeFileSync is what? a backup software?" It's a folder and file syncing utility; it can mirror a source onto a target, it can update source and target with each other's new material. I was asking the other folks in here if such a utility can help make things easier for you.