Easy Store Drive not working

[SquarePeg]

Today in the middle of downloading from the SD card, my WD Easy Story drive seems to have crapped out. It was working fine and then just stopped making progress (according to the progress bars in LRC). I gave it 30 minutes since these are large files but nothing moved. I cancelled the Import and when I went to start it over, the Easy Store was not showing up in my drives. It is plugged in, getting power and light is blinking rapidly as if it is reading/writing on the drive but not detected by my MacBook. I left it alone for a few hours and then restarted my laptop. Still just blinks but not detected. My OIS is up to date.

I have a lot of photo files on this drive and while I have back ups of all of the finished/edited photos and still have the SD cards for a lot of others, I would prefer to get this working again. I save a lot of raw files when I shoot astrophotography so I can go back and edit them later if I ever get up the enthusiasm for stacking and blending. Those would be lost if I can't recover them from this disk.

Suggestions from the techies on the forum?

 

[SquarePeg]

I have restarted my laptop with no change. I have plugged the drive into my daughter's laptop and same result. The light just blinks and the drive sounds like it's spinning but it doesn't load.

 

[smoke665]

That stinks! You might check to see if there's a File Recovery service near, that could possibly save the data for you. I had a similar issue with a WD external several years ago, started using Seagate as a result.

 

[jeffashman]

That doesn't sound good. When something similar has happened to me, the drive has never recovered. Now I store everything on OneDrive. It costs, but for me it's worth it not to lose everything. I do put older images on a Seagate Constellation drive, which removes them from OneDrive, but they are old enough that I'll probably never get back to them. The important images are currently on Flickr.

 

[SquarePeg]

That stinks! You might check to see if there's a File Recovery service near, that could possibly save the data for you. I had a similar issue with a WD external several years ago, started using Seagate as a result.

I just plugged in the new Seagate that I bought last month before my trip to Oregon! I had switched to WD when an old Seagate failed on me. It's annoying and a pita but I have my "keepers" stored on Flickr and a 2nd cloud storage so not a huge loss. It's the raw files for the astro stuff that I really wanted to keep. I will look into a recovery service.

That doesn't sound good. When something similar has happened to me, the drive has never recovered. Now I store everything on OneDrive. It costs, but for me it's worth it not to lose everything. I do put older images on a Seagate Constellation drive, which removes them from OneDrive, but they are old enough that I'll probably never get back to them. The important images are currently on Flickr.

I'll have to look into OneDrive. Since most of my stuff is just for me, I don't want to spend a ton but these portable drives are really poorly thought out! I have had several fail on me.

 

[smoke665]

@SquarePeg I've not used them but supposedly Best Buy Geek Squad has recovery services.

Online would be tough for me due to lack of high speed internet. If if I had the capability I'm old school preferring my data being close.

If I can ever get my geek son to help me Id like to set up a NAS RAID.

 

[Rickbb]

50/50 chance its not the drive but the PCB/USB interface in it. A decent independent computer repair shop can dismantle it and put the drive in a different enclosure or hook it straight to a PC.

That’s worked for me a few times, but if its the drive itself you’d have to go to great expense to even try to get a recovery specialist to work on it.

 

[snowbear]

Is the drive in NTFS format? If so, do you have access to a Windows machine?

I lost an external Seagate a few years ago with everything on it and ended up using disk recovery software. IDK which one but it had a 30-day or so trial that worked on most pof them, including thumbnails as individual images. I'm not sure if it was with the Mac or Win laptop - it was about the time I switched back to Windows.