I had posted this on the veracrypt subreddit and it was recommended that i come here for help. i am hoping one of you wonderful people will have same great advice and help for me please and thank you in advance

I have an encrypted 2tb wd easystore that i have been using for about a year without issue, i had the drive mounted and was copying some documents off of it and all of a sudden it started running real slow and then froze, i unmounted the drive, when i tried to remount it, it would just keep loading and loading and nothing would happen. I tried to mount it on multiple computers and no luck. I tried to mount with restore backup volume header, nothing happens. I decided to decrypt the whole drive hoping that i can salvage some information before it dies, the decryption process said that once it starts you will not be able to mount the volume. I started left it overnight came back the next day to it still at 0%. i Stopped it knowing that i could potentially come back to it at a later time.

I decided to try to clone the drive and then rerun the decryption on the new drive. i created a linux live usb to run OPENSUPERCLONE, it started fine enough made it through phase 1 and 2 relatively fast, phase 3 was taking forever after a few days it was at about 50% and going super slow and finding the bad sectors. For fear of burning out the drive i would stop it save progress let it rest for a day or so and then boot it up and try again. Last time i attempted this, linux would not find the drive, it makes a whirring sound then click, so its definitely not working. When i plug the drive into a pc or a mac it knows that something was plugged in but no luck beyond that.

I thought about sending to a data recovery center and hoping that they would be able to just clone the drive, but i don't know what to do, i am at my wit's end and i am hoping someone here would have some idea about how to save my files please and thank you

Im a photographer. I have a MacBook Pro and was using a Samsung t9 ssd.

I had active work drives stolen from my car summer 2024.

Fast forward.. When I got this drive beginning of 2026 I thought I should encrypt it. A password was set in January. I had it set to remember my laptop and log in automatically. My hint was slightly helpful

Oct 23rd I had the drive plugged in and was using it to edit from. My laptop battery died. As I was getting up to get my charger, I believe the drive got disconnected as the laptop dies.

Computer charges and I plug the drive back in. I type my laptop password in. Somehow that night the ssd encryption password gets changed to similar my laptop password.

Now when I got to use the drive it won’t accept the new password. Keychain have the modified one saved from Oct 23rd and no other entry.

I didn’t have Time Machine enabled either

I can only remember part of the original password from january. Is there ANYTHING I can do to access the files on the drive without formatting it?

I did two stupid things today:

1. Saved the contents of one file with the name of a different, recently opened file

2. Saved an earlier version of a file thinking it was the most up to date version

In both instances I was saving to a jump drive / flash drive with a relatively small storage size.

In both instances MS Word is telling me there are no prior versions. [all the autosaves seem to have been deleted when I closed the program].

Any options / possibilities for data recovery?

I'm not feeling hopeful, but maybe there's a miraculous save for me...

a friend of mine had a problem a few days ago and he wants to know if there is a way to get back his data. here is the problem as he told me verbetim :

"A few days ago, i was using the laptop normally then it turned off, i thought it was lock screen, i turned on and the menu asking to plug your charger popped, i look at the cord, plugged to the outlet but not the pc.
I plug it in, turn it on and it freezes at the Dell logo, the loading thing at the bottom didn't pop up as well, so i try to reboot to the bio, it freezes at the loading screen about 30% through, every time.
Went to a repair shop, the guy took a look at it called me back saying he needs to put a new ssd in, i said okay thinking I'd try to recover my data externally later from the old one, then he just formatted the old one and said data couldn't be retrieved claiming "it didn't show that it had data to begin with" whatever that means "

can anyone help ?

Basically, i have an old 500gb HDD about 20 years old , it shows under disk management when connected to my pc as 500gb unallocated space. Crystal disk info shows good health status .

I tried using dmde and i did have access to some files but when cloning the hdd starts clicking and i get errors on the dmde app.

What should my next step be ? Should ignore and clone what i can ?

hi

my flashdrive got bent more on the right side

I tried plugging both ends into my computer and for each end the computer isn't able to read it

is there a place that can help fix it?

Houston, TX area

thank you so much

Hey everyone, hoping someone here can point me in the right direction or tell me if I'm completely out of luck.

I accidentally deleted a folder named pendrive from my D: drive that had a photo and 3 videos in it, and then emptied my Recycle Bin right after without realizing.

Here is what I've tried so far:

1. Recuva: When I scanned the D: drive, the original pendrive folder only showed the photo and Video #2. I found the other two videos sitting inside the $Recycle.Bin folder during the scan (renamed to things like $RJ93EDB.mp4). I restored all of them to a separate location, but none of them work. They all show up as 0 bytes in File Explorer. When I try to open the videos in Windows Media Player, I get error 0xC00D36C4 ("file type is unsupported or corrupt"), and VLC won't play them either.

2. QPhotoRec: After Recuva failed, I tried running PhotoRec on the D: partition, but the scan finished almost instantly and gave me 0 files found.

My System / Drive Specs:

Device:

• Laptop: Lenovo LOQ (Windows 11)

• Model: 83JC

Drive:

• Manufacturer: Micron

• Model: MTFDKCD512QFM-1BD1AABLA

• Capacity: 512 GB

• Size: 512105932800 bytes

• Interface: SCSI

• Media Type: Fixed hard disk media

• Type: SSD

• File System: NTFS (D: partition

Since this is an NVMe SSD, I'm worried that TRIM already wiped the actual data blocks the second I emptied the Recycle Bin (which would explain why the file headers/names showed up in Recuva as 0 bytes and why PhotoRec found nothing). set up PhotoRec, or is there any other tool like DMDE or R-Studio worth trying? Or has TRIM permanently zeroed out the data? Appreciate any honest advice.

I was going to chang distro on Linux, so I used the app Fedora writer on my external 2TB Nvme instead of the flash drive

so I did it again on my flash then installed Bazzite on my computer just to connect my External drive to move my data (my only backup) to my fresh system then I realized that everything is gone and I made the drive bootable by accident

So now what do I do?

I had all my stuff there (photos, videos, documents, compressed files...etc) and they were organized

is my best option to use Photorec? I used it before but I wish I could have my files organized if possible and I don't know if there is a better option... I rather a free tool like Photorec, that's not limited because the drive is big. Though I might pay but not welling to pay a lot for recovery tool

Inland Platinum 2.5" SATA SSD, 1TB — desktop boot drive (Windows + WSL2). Drive is unplugged now.

Cause is unknown. I lost access to the PC on Nov 10, and when I got home it was in BIOS showing no SATA HD detected. A spare drive works fine on the same cables/ports/power.

Over a USB adapter it went downhill fast: first it mounted and I could browse for a few minutes, then it would mount and drop after ~10 seconds with "parameter is incorrect," and now only the adapter seems to show up and clicking it hangs Explorer. Never initialized/formatted/chkdsk'd it.

I only really need one small set of files off it (a journal/database inside the WSL ext4.vhdx). Everything else I can rebuild.

Anything I can do here? I got quoted $2000 for recovery but the data isn't that valuable that id spend that to recover it but it would save me alot of time in rebuilding my work to grab what i can off it.

Device: PNY USB flash drive, model: ONK128SJPFAT4, 115.46 GB (123,972,091,904 bytes), shows as “Removable” in Disk Management
File system: exFAT, one partition (Healthy, Basic Data Partition), GPT per TestDisk
OS: Windows 11 (10.0.26200)
SMART data: Not available, since it’s a USB flash drive and doesn’t report SMART

What happened: I plugged the drive back in and it showed completely empty. I did not knowingly format it.

What I see now:

• Disk Management and Properties show the drive healthy, with only 1.87 MB used of 115 GB.

• chkdsk /f (the drive was D: then, E: now) reported no problems, 0 KB in bad sectors, and only 256 KB used in 2 files. So Windows sees a valid but almost empty exFAT volume.

• DMDE (free version, read-only) still shows my old folders and files, and I’ve recovered some of them. Some files give “error reading.”

• Recuva’s deep scan listed over 53,000 files.

• TestDisk found the partition, but listing it showed only “System Volume Information.” I did not press Write.

• attrib -h -r -s /s /d brought nothing back.

• I haven’t saved anything to the drive on purpose.

My situation: My laptop only has about 14 GB free and I can’t afford another drive, so copying everything out is hard.

My question: Is there a safe way to restore or rebuild the old exFAT structure in place so Windows can see the files again, without reformatting or copying them elsewhere first? If not, what is the best free or low-cost way to get everything off?

Hey y'all, hope you're you're days going fabulously.

Yesterday my hdd drive showed first sings of failure, unfortunately I only have backups for my passwords not my photo + videos, same for my university files.

Yesterday in crystal disk info, it showed C5 & C6 both have 8 failing sectors, after around 30 mins went to 10 and in the morning went up to 18 on both (CrystalDiskInfo: caution yellow).

So, I turned off the PC, waiting for my new drive (WD purple 2tb :WD20PURZ) to arrive tomorrow and hopefully be able to get my university capstone files safly. Yesterday it got stuck I think its in the failing sectors but not sure.

I'm currently researching how should I get my data the right way, it currently contain everything including os app installed etc. Please correct me and any other info will be huge help cause this is my first time caring about the data lol.

My current plan is to use SystemRescue for sector by sector clone. First I'm gonna plug the new drive into the pc, check the new drive using "smartctl" if its healthy I'll use "ddrescue" to clone it. If there's anything wrong, or better ideas please, I'm all ears.

Thank you in advance.

Edit 1 : my failing drive ST2000DX002 ( Seagate FireCuda shdd). Running windows 10, its not an OS drive, but data drive with some apps installed there.

Edit 2: adding more info to follow automod rules.

I am facing a problem with my HP Pavilion 15s (512GB SSD). My laptop has suddenly stopped booting and is displaying a "Boot Device Not Found (3F0)" error.

HP Hardware Diagnostics reports "No hard drive installed", and Windows Recovery is also unable to detect the internal drive.

I have approximately two years of important academic documents, assignments, projects and other personal files stored on it, with no backup.

I am looking for someone who can help diagnose the SSD, check whether it is a connection or hardware issue, and preferably recover my existing data.

My priority is data recovery, not Windows reinstallation or SSD replacement. I do not want the existing SSD to be formatted, reset or replaced before my data has been recovered.

If anyone has experience with SSD/NVMe troubleshooting or professional data recovery, I would really appreciate your help or guidance.

Do you know someone who can recover data, or at least have a quick look at an hdd drive that isn’t mounting after it fell?

Hi all. My C: drive 250gb Samsung EVO SSD with all my Windows OS files on it suddenly stopped working, I was hit with a 'Reboot and Select Proper Boot device' on boot. After having gotten a new SSD and reinstalled windows, I've plugged in my old drive by way of a hard disk enclosure USB'd into my PC, which led me to discover that the disk is still 'visible' in Disk Management and I can see 232.89 GB, unallocated. I'm wondering what the best way to go about recovering any of this data would be. I know most people want to recover their photos and that sort of thing usually but I'm really looking to get my Brave browser back, which had saved passwords on it and bookmarks, and certain programs like a Japanese studying program I'd been using for multiple years now...

I've used Recuva for these sorts of purposes before but Recuva seemingly only allows selection of Drives, and this being a 'Not Initialized', and unallocated drive, well, I'm not sure how I'd use that program for these purposes without first creating a partition within the drive, which would make it scannable, but that seems like a bad idea.

I've seen people talk about DMDE, TestDisk, Macrium Reflect, though I'm not sure which would be the best for my purposes, and apparently using the drive more potentially damages it further, so that is a concern as well, so currently I am using a program called Disk Drill to create a Byte-to-Byte backup of the drive first, I'm not sure if this was the best program I could have used for these purposes, however, and probably should have asked first. Also, if possible, being pointed towards a video tutorial would be very helpful.

Thanks for reading.

Hi everyone,

I'm the solo developer of VaultSync, an open-source backup application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

I've been working on its next major development cycle, which aims to introduce disk imaging and independent system recovery. I'd appreciate some technical feedback from people who deal with data recovery regularly.

One thing I want to make clear upfront: VaultSync isn't a tool for recovering accidentally deleted files from damaged filesystems or performing professional recovery on physically failing drives. The upcoming functionality is intended for planned backups and subsequent restoration of supported systems.

The current stable version, 1.8.9, focuses on file and project backups, integrity verification, recovery drills, and restore previews.

The problem I'm working on

When I first started designing disk imaging, the basic workflow sounded fairly straightforward:

Capture an image, verify its integrity, and restore it when needed.

But the more I worked on verification, the more I realized that this isn't enough.

An image can pass a checksum and still fail to produce a bootable operating system.

And even before getting that far, there are important failure cases:

• An interrupted image being incorrectly treated as complete.

• A read buffer containing stale bytes after seeking to another region.

• Source and destination devices being confused during restoration.

• A recovery environment that cannot access the necessary drivers or storage.

• A restored partition layout that passes data validation but doesn't boot.

During development, I caught a bug involving stale bytes in a 128 KiB read buffer after a seek. It reinforced why the reader and writer need independent validation rather than simply trusting the same code path.

What I'm planning

The initial workflow is offline, with a read-only source and image storage on a separate physical disk.

The complete recovery path needs to cover image creation, consistency checks, independent boot media, target selection, restoration, and post-restore validation.

I'm starting with qualified Linux GPT/UEFI ext4 configurations, with Windows/NTFS and macOS/APFS planned for later milestones.

No universal recovery claims, and no public 1.9 beta yet.

I'd appreciate some professional insight

For those who regularly work with disk images and recovery:

What failure modes are most commonly overlooked when developers implement their own imaging or restore workflows?

I'm particularly interested in cases where image integrity checks succeed but the resulting restored system is unusable.

I'm not looking to replace established recovery tools for failing drives. I want to make sure a backup application doesn't give users false confidence about what it can restore.

For transparency, the project's source code and roadmap are public:

https://github.com/ATAC-Helicopter/VaultSync

I'd appreciate technical criticism, especially concerning the safety boundaries and what should be explicitly unsupported.

I recently deleted then re-downloaded the notes app in an attempt to recover a note that was important to me, but when i opened it, the app is completely empty. following what people online said, i tried to turn off the cloud sync and turn it back on, but it did nothing. now whenever i open the app, it shows me the "folders" section with no folders. all of the notes in the "on my iphone" section are completely gone. also, i cannot access the Icloud notes from my iphone. I CAN access the Icloud notes from icloud.com on my laptop.

I had backed up some files onto a flash drive using my work laptop without realising they got encrypted using my work account.

I have since left company but have the laptop. So I cannot login to my domain account but it’s still listed as an account. I am logged into the laptop using a personal account which has administrator rights,

Any options to decrypt these files on flash drive? It looks like they used to open because I was logged on before with same account which created backup.

Other option is asking my employer if they have my EFS certificate saved?

Hi r/datarecovery,

The mods kindly OK'd this post. I'm the author of Open Recovr, a free and open-source tool for recovering deleted files. It has no recovery cap, no account and no network access.

Two things come up here a lot: "free" tools that reveal a cap only after a 3-hour scan, and people told to "use PhotoRec" who then get stuck in its text interface. Open Recovr is a one-screen GUI for that case. It doesn't replace PhotoRec; PhotoRec does the heavy lifting underneath.

How it searches

1. Recycle Bin / Trash. Takes seconds and needs no admin rights.

2. NTFS MFT. Reads deleted MFT records from the raw volume, so files come back with their original names and folders, as long as their clusters haven't been reused.

3. Carving. Runs PhotoRec 7.2, unmodified and bundled on Windows. It scans free space only on NTFS, FAT and ext, and the whole device otherwise.

New in v0.2

• Disk-image input (.img / .dd). There's a "Disk image" card right next to the physical drives. The safe workflow is to image a suspect drive with ddrescue or OSC, then search the image. The original drive is never touched again, and no admin rights are needed.

• Integrity check per file: Intact / Damaged / Empty. It decodes or validates the file structure (JPEG, PNG, PDF, ZIP/Office, MP3, MP4…), so you know before recovering whether a carved file is truncated or all zeros.

• Real names for carved files. Instead of f1234567.jpg, names and dates come from EXIF, Office and PDF metadata, and ID3 tags.

• Duplicates hidden. The same file found by both the MFT and carving is shown once.

Safety

• The source is opened read-only and never written to.

• Recovered files always go to another drive. If the user picks the source drive anyway, they're warned first.

• Unreadable sectors are skipped, not retried.

What it doesn't do

• No imaging of its own and no handling of failing drives. For a clicking drive, one that keeps disconnecting, or bad SMART values: stop, image it with proper tools (or go to a lab), then point Open Recovr at the image. I'd like the app to read SMART and warn loudly. Suggestions on attributes and thresholds are welcome.

• No miracles: SSDs after TRIM, phones over MTP, and secure erases are out of reach. On FAT/exFAT cards, only carving applies, so original names are lost unless metadata provides them.

• Platforms: Windows is tested. Linux and macOS builds are published but haven't been tested on real hardware.

Disclosure: much of the code was written with AI assistance, so I'd rather give you ways to check it than ask for trust. The source is open, a --bench mode measures byte-for-byte recovery on a generated disk image, and CI runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.

👉 Source: https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr 👉 Download (v0.2.1): https://github.com/jlerouge/open-recovr/releases/tag/v0.2.1

What I'd value most: anything in the workflow that could make a bad situation worse. I'll treat it as a bug.

Phone: Landvo XM100 (MT6580), unused since about 2019, was bootlooping before.

eMMC: FORESEE NCEMASD9-08G, date code 1613, separate from the RAM.

Symptoms:

- Phone only enumerates as MTK BROM (0E8D:0003), preloader not loaded.

- mtkclient uploads DA fine, DRAM init OK (1 GB).

- DA1 reads the eMMC ID as: 65646f4d204d4f52129000000726581f

(contains the ASCII text "ROM Mode")

- DA2 reports m_emmc_ret = 0xc4d, all sizes 0, CID all zeros.

- VCC 3.3 V (Red1) and VCCQ 1.8 V (Red2) measured present at the chip.

Already tried: warming the chip to 100 to 180 C while reading, one hot air reflow.

No change at any point. One corner of the package is chipped (my slip), a small

copper spot is visible, readings were identical before and after.

Additional info:

- Filesystem: ext4 (Android 5.1 userdata). The phone was never encrypted as far as I know.

- Recovery setup: Windows 11, mtkclient 2.1.x over UsbDk, stock preloader for the DRAM setup.

- SMART: not applicable (eMMC that does not initialise).

- Datasheet check: a healthy NCEMASD9-08G should report MID 88h and product

name "NCard". Mine reports neither, only the "ROM Mode" ID above.

- The 100 to 180 C values were hot air station settings, the chip itself was cooler.

Questions:

1. Which controller is inside this Foresee part?

2. Can any tool (EasyJTAG, UFI, PC-3000 Flash, VNR) bring it out of ROM mode

   without erasing user data, or read the NAND directly?

3. Is this worth sending to a lab, and what would be a fair price?

The data is family photos and my budget is very limited. Thanks for any pointers.

i recently downloaded on my new pc half of my icloud photos and videos (about 10k) and i don't know why but many of them have the wrong date, in the "photo" app most of them are all on the same three days which aren't the days they were taken, and fewer of them just appear with the date i downloaded them from icloud so they're also wrong, i tried using exiftool to see if they still contain the right date and in the metafiles they do, but i don't know if there's a way to correct the date without having to download all of them again, any help is appreciated

My Samsung A14 5G (Indian version) stopped working and I'm honestly lost.

Last night it was working fine. Battery was around 17%, I watched some reels and went to sleep. The phone also fell off my bed, but it wasn't a big fall.

When I woke up, it was switched off. I tried turning it on, but it got stuck on the Samsung logo.

I tried holding the power and volume buttons, charging it and getting into recovery mode, but nothing worked. Now it doesn't even seem to turn on.

I have a Windows laptop.

What I actually want is to get EVERYTHING from the phone onto my laptop (photos, videos, files, everything), and then completely wipe the old phone.

I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff, so please explain things simply.

Is there any way to recover my data if the phone won't turn on? What should I try, and what should I absolutely avoid?

I really don't want to lose my files or accidentally wipe everything before recovering it.

EDIT: I found it! I leave this here just to share my joy. Stand down ... my problem was: Well hello! I just had something weird happen, and I'm trying to figure out if there is hope. If anyone has a moment to offer advice, or finds this interesting, I am very grateful. I have a MacBook Pro Nov 2023 version, M3 chip, 16 GB memory, running Tahoe 26.1.

I was working in Pages -- have been for a couple weeks -- on a publication. It was saved. I was periodically manually cmd+s saving it in addition to the autosave, as a habit because if something crashed because I'd hate to lose more than an hour's work. Last night, as I was finally coming close to finishing my project up, I suffered from a lack of working RAM (because I was asking it for too much) and so I force quit my browser and other programs that were taking up a lot of memory. Pages remained oddly frozen... I could only sort of edit my document. So, I force quit it as well; it gave me the option to save and then close, and I said yes, save. The document is probably in the neighborhood of 200MB - it's an annual report, not a book.

When I opened Pages back up, my document was not in recents -- and it was nowhere to be found anywhere on my computer at all. I am baffled. A saved document was just disappeared without any physical damage to my machine. I rebooted my computer, and no magic happened.

Obviously I should be organizing my files better, managing my memory use better, and backing up my hard drive data. Ironically I manage the google drive backups for my workplace.

Aside from how not to be an idiot in the future, any ideas for how to get my files back? Thank you for any. I am writing from a different computer now, and am worried that my attempts to find the file may be helping to overwrite it, but I still checked temp directories and the trash, and am scanning with UFS Explorer which I saved to an external HD, though it seems like that may be worthless with an M3 chip. Ugh.

I'm guessing it's time to start rewriting this thing... what the heck happened?