Data Recovery - What would you do!

take drive out and use a conversion cord to read it, or box thing you put drive in, unknown name, dock comes to mind

or cloning software to write it to another drive

you mentioned a friend was going to build you a new one, perhaps they could clone it for you

 

so sorry, that not good...
everyones worse fear

i have no knowledge of m2 drives. we got old puters. so when i get new, gonna be lost.
I will probley be in your shoes soon

 

If you've got time, I'd transfer from laptop or EHD. But you'll probably have to do it in batches. So start with photos or products something you really want...and do small increments. That may help.

 

I had this problem a couple years ago and I finally bit the bullet and bought a bigger and better external hard drive. It made it so much easier and it gives you another back up. The drives have really come down in price the past few years. Good luck.

 

I have done the BB recovery drive -- worked well for me.

 

It sounds like BB may have worked out. Even if it's slow, that may be your best bet. If you don't want to go through BB, consider buying a flash drive (the thumb drive type) in whatever capacity you can afford and transfer that number of GBs at a time. Maybe moving smaller amounts at a time will let you get more moved before each laptop crash. I'm not sure how much thumb drives cost near you, but in the US you can find 64GB drives on sale for under $15.

 

I know cost is a factor, but the more backups the better! I use Crashplan and have them control both my online backup and my local EHD backup. The online backup protects me in case something happens to my home, and it's also more up to date. I try to run my EHD backup once a month, but I don't always succeed. If I needed to restore a large amount, I'd start by restoring from my EHD then fill in the rest from the online backup.

 

I'm like Rachel. I use both. Backblaze I leave running all the time. I know I have fast internet, so it's different for you. I don't know whether a different online backup would work for you if it's an internet speed issue. My online backup gives me peace of mind because it works without my input. And then I have an on-site EHD that I use when I remember, usually about the 1st of the month.

Personally, after my initial backup, I don't often need to download a lot of data at once, just a few things here and there. Except when my drive crashed. Then I did a bunch of data downloads as I needed it, and mailed for the drive (I totally get why that doesn't work for you). If your new computer works well, you may not need to download as much once you get past the initial download.

I know @Karen only uses EHD's - so she has a system that she's shared with how she rotates them.

 

When my computer died in 2019 and I needed to get stuff off of BB, I found that I had to do smaller downloads to even get it to work. My internet isn't the fastest but it isn't bad either. I had tried to do a big zip file and it just wasn't moving very fast at all. I cancelled it and started a smaller zip. That worked. So in the end I had multiple smaller zip downloads of the things that I needed right away. Like Courtney, I did order the EHD so that I had everything else.

Way back when I started with BB, I found that the best way to initiate a backup was to not choose everything at once. That's when I also started using EHD's. Everything was on there and the most important stuff went to BB. When that finished, I added more and kept doing that until I got everything I wanted in the backup set.

And, now I only use EHD's (4 of them) since BB ended up causing me internet interruptions all the time. Even after getting this computer and setting up BB on it, I had interruptions. When I paused the BB for a few days I had absolutely none. And, since I quit BB I haven't had any of that type of interruption.

 

Yeah... I just use my own EHD back up system. I have one backup EHD at home and one backup EHD at work (my offsite). I just take my working EHD to work on Fridays and run a program called SyncToy to copy over only the new stuff. Then I do the same at home when I remember which isn't as consistent as my one at work. The downside of this system is I have to rely on my memory to do the backup. Yikes! But, I did drop my EHD at work once right after I had backed it up (Thank God!) and it died. Caput. So I had everything backed up and just had to buy the new EHD and copy everything over to the new one. That takes long enough with almost 2 TB of files, so I can't imagine having to download that much.