Suddenly lost data on external HDD

[jesse789]

A week ago I bought a 2TB WD My Book external USB HDD, and I've had no issues. Yesterday, after transferring about 9GB from my laptop to the external HDD, I then plugged it into my desktop, and saw that only a few files were transferred. Also, several large folders that had been created a week ago were now gone. There are ~30GB of files visible on the external HDD, but Windows shows there is ~50GB of used space. 20 GB is about the size of the folders that just disappeared. All hidden files are visible.

I had double checked after doing my laptop transfer, and the files were visible on the external HDD, and I safely removed the USB connection. I'm running Recuva in deep scan mode right now, but it doesn't seem to be finding anything.

What did I do wrong? I can understand if I botched the transfer, and lost the data being moved, but why did it take out ~20GB of stuff already on the HDD? Should I have formatted and partitioned the drive before using it? Should I be using a transfer method other than drag & drop?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Numenorean]

You should probably be using a backup system in which you aren't relying on a single drive. Drive dies, data gone.

Drag and drop works fine and there is no need to partition the drive into more than one partition.

Likely something just got screwed up on that drive. That or you accidentally drug those "missing" folders into another folder on the drive - and they are there but just not where you think they should be. Do a search for one of the folder names or file names that you think is missing.

 

[jesse789]

Yeah, I tried searching for file and folder names, but they are not there. Here's my confusion: Select-all->right click->properties shows that I have 30GB of files (hidden files are visible). Right-click->properties in My Computer shows that the drive has 50GB of space used. Is this difference an obvious sign that there is something physically wrong?

 

[Numenorean]

Well something could be screwed up on the drive. What version of windows? You could try running chkdsk on it - if there are just some screwed up things in the file system that could fix it.

 

[jesse789]

Thanks, I'll do that. I'm using XP, with the latest update.