Damaged External Hard Drive

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Recently I have been finding evedence of some form of damage/corruption on my external drive. When backing up perfectly good images here is how a few of them are appearring on my drive. The drive is a Western Digital My Book . Any body ever seen this before? I'm sure I need to get yet another one and back up everything on it but I wonder if I back up these images will it corrupt the new HD?

[Gary Lien]

If you do not have that drive backed up somewhere, do it right now. Then trouble shoot the old drive. I am not a e technichian, but what I see does not look good.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Cheryl - Not sure if it will actually do any damage, but if it were me I would not copy those files when copying the rest of the hard drive. Btw I've had 2 external hard drives fail recently but fortunately in each case I had another copy of the drive. I'm a big proponent of always having at least 2 copies so if one fails you still have everything.

Rachel

[Diane Miller]

Backing up corrupted images won't damage the drive, but the damaged images won't be salvageable by any means I know about. If this drive is your only copy of your images, as Gary said, back it up asap, on 2 identical drives. Hard drives are guaranteed to fail.

[PhilCook]

Sadly unless you have those broken images on your main PC/mac then they are lost, but as already mentioned back up the in tact images/files immediately onto another HD.

I actually have essentially 4 back ups ....3 external HD's, and my laptop which also acts as a backup storage. One of my externals is kept out of my home at my neighbors home just in case of burglary or fire, you can never be too careful in my opinion

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

I had the same recently and it turned out to be a fault in Adobe Bridge: it creates a partially corrupted thumb.
So, try to rebuild the thumbnails.

Also, when you load the raw (as in my case) it loaded fine in ACR and PS

Interesting and thanks everybody for the response. Lucky for me I noticed it right away and did not remove the images from my PC so I am ok with that I'm just bummed I paid 100 bucks for a drive that's only a few months old and its ruined. I am backin up again tomorrow.

[Grace Scalzo]

Cheryl, Doesn't the drive have a warranty? They all do fail at some point in tim,e, but shouldn't after just a few months.

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Cheryl, Doesn't the drive have a warranty? They all do fail at some point in tim,e, but shouldn't after just a few months.
Grace, I am so bad with that stuff... I need a personal manager LOL

[Dan Brown]

Hi Cheryl. So did you try rebuilding the thumbs? I have lots of WD's with no problems (I probably just jinxed that!). FYI, I keep 3 external copies synced using Syncback (free version). I also have started burning most of my current original captures to Bluray for another copy and another type media.

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Hi Cheryl. So did you try rebuilding the thumbs? I have lots of WD's with no problems (I probably just jinxed that!). FYI, I keep 3 external copies synced using Syncback (free version). I also have started burning most of my current original captures to Bluray for another copy and another type media.
Not sure what you mean Dan. When I open in raw it looks the same... really bad How do I rebiuld?

[Dan Brown]

Not sure what you mean Dan. When I open in raw it looks the same... really bad How do I rebiuld?Oh, if the raw is corrupted then it's curtains! I was hoping for your sake, that the problem was simply corrupted bridge thumbs.

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Oh, if the raw is corrupted then it's curtains! I was hoping for your sake, that the problem was simply corrupted bridge thumbs.
Lucky for me when it started happening I still had the files on my PC so good for now. Ordered a new drive today Thanks for the input

[Don Burnham]

A couple of years ago I had the same problem. Are you using the USB cable supplied by Western Digital. A poor/defective cable can create"noise" on the data transfer, corrupting files. I had an external power supply create problems also.
I took the drive out of the external case and installed into my computer, and is working fine. All drives will fail..when is the question. I think Western Digital makes the best drives on the market.

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Well , I just finished backing up a TB full of raws. I need to learn to delete more easilyLOL.