Help: Hard Drive Advice, Anyone?
This household was recently the epicenter of a small but potent technical disaster shockwave. Or I suppose it would be more accurate to say I was the epicenter. For 24 hours, everything I touched broke. Everything. Even the Wonderfalls disc we got from Netflix wouldn't play, and all I did to that was open the envelope.
Among the major casualties was my external hard drive. The problem appears to be the connector. When I insert a cable (I've switched out cables, so I know it isn't the cable itself), it goes in at an angle, and the tongue-thing inside the port-thing (um, my technical vocabulary is limited) is visibly bent. (My suspicion is that someone at some point dropped the drive or whacked it and I just discovered it yesterday, which is good in that it would make me feel less like the Technological Typhoid Mary, and bad in that if someone dropped it, the drive may be internally fucked, too. But I'm clinging to hope.)
The thing is, almost everything I have on this drive I also have elsewhere, except one important thing. Or set of things. It contains all my saved vids, about 30 GBs of them. I could never re-create the collection, even if I remembered what all was on there, because some of those vids aren't available anymore. So I would like to save or recover the hard drive contents, if I can. (No, I don't have a backup of the vids. This is in fact my backup drive, which is making me nervous, because, well, a Technological Typhoid Mary should have lots of backups.)
Does anyone have any suggestions? Any specialized knowledge or hints or anything? If you do, I would so very much love to hear about it.
Help. Please. I don't want to lose all my vids. They are precious to me!
*pathetic snuffling noises*
Among the major casualties was my external hard drive. The problem appears to be the connector. When I insert a cable (I've switched out cables, so I know it isn't the cable itself), it goes in at an angle, and the tongue-thing inside the port-thing (um, my technical vocabulary is limited) is visibly bent. (My suspicion is that someone at some point dropped the drive or whacked it and I just discovered it yesterday, which is good in that it would make me feel less like the Technological Typhoid Mary, and bad in that if someone dropped it, the drive may be internally fucked, too. But I'm clinging to hope.)
The thing is, almost everything I have on this drive I also have elsewhere, except one important thing. Or set of things. It contains all my saved vids, about 30 GBs of them. I could never re-create the collection, even if I remembered what all was on there, because some of those vids aren't available anymore. So I would like to save or recover the hard drive contents, if I can. (No, I don't have a backup of the vids. This is in fact my backup drive, which is making me nervous, because, well, a Technological Typhoid Mary should have lots of backups.)
Does anyone have any suggestions? Any specialized knowledge or hints or anything? If you do, I would so very much love to hear about it.
Help. Please. I don't want to lose all my vids. They are precious to me!
*pathetic snuffling noises*