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I had a folder with txt files stored on my external hard drive. Today when I fired my external drive up the folder had magically disappeared. No the folder is not "hidden". It's gone! Tried using Recuva but it wouldnt find it. Tried deep scan but after 12 hours if was at 2% just great.

Anything I can do or should I just forget it? I've been working so hard and now it's all gone :(

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Have you tried plugging it into another computer? Preferably a linux one. – Peter Maxwell Jul 5 '12 at 21:42
The problem is that deep-scan uses a signature-based method to search for files and since text files have no signature, it has nothing to go on. Worse, the drive is obviously pretty large, so checking each and every cluster will take forever. What you need to do is try to recover teh filesystem. The best, free undelete program I have seen is Undelete 360. If that doesn not work, you may need to perform some diagnostics to try to figure out what happened and then handle move forward depending on what caused the problem. – Synetech Jul 5 '12 at 21:44
Can you see the drive? Can you see the root directory? Does it say the free space is equal to the total space? Did you try running chkdsk? Make sure not to write anything to the drive until you have either recovered your files or completely given up! – Synetech Jul 5 '12 at 21:46
The user's first commandment: Thou shalt make backups! All sorts of things can go wrong with computers and people (user malfunctions). Make frequent, multiple, backups and store some of them off site. Then, all you lose is the work done since the last valid backup. With all sorts of backup systems available for every OS - many of them free or very inexpensive, it's just about the discipline to run them on a regular basis. If you're always connected to a lan, another external disk drive, or the Internet, you can even schedule them to run automatically. – Joe Jul 9 '12 at 20:48

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recovery takes time. dont use the drive till you have done recovery. you did not specify any information about format type etc. since you tried recuva Im assuming ntfs.

I have had good luck with "ntfs-undelete" utility.

If you have a old junker pc around that works you may want to hook the drive up to that and let it run for as long as it needs to. when its ready to recover files just map to something with some space and your all set.

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