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Entire backup vanished after 3 failed recovery attempts.

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If this isn't the correct place to ask for help please redirect me to where I can get this figured out, thanks.

I reinstalled a clean version of Windows 10 yesterday to fix some seperate PC issues related to gaming, then today I tried to recover the backup files from my 4 TB My Book external hard drive using "Acronics True Image for Western Digital". After choosing the green recovery option in the Acronis app, the PC would reboot into the recovery mode and essenitially freeze with 0 progress on the progress bar displayed and after about a moment or two reboot back into my clean install of windows, not recovering anything and no error message from Acronis. This happened 3 times leading me to create a bootable media on my USB flash drive and attempting it that way. After attempting that, the bootable media displayed the external hard drive as completely empty as if it had been wiped. I then restart the pc, login into windows and my entire backup has vanished (the drive is completely empty in windows) with no error code and little to no explanation. 

Is there something I can do to get my backup back? I just lost everything out of no where.

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Comments: 1727

Hello!

That behavior isn't expected.

Check the External Drive: First, make sure your external hard drive is properly connected and recognized by Windows. Sometimes, it might not show up due to connection issues.

Please note that if everything was erased from the disk, there's no way to recover it. That's why we advise adding 2nd and 3rd locations for your backups.

Also, please note that we don't support that version of the product. I would suggest contacting WD so they can guide you through the issue: https://kb.acronis.com/content/2201

Best regards.

Ryan, welcome to these public User Forums.

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

Given your information provided above then I would offer the following comments:

  • Minimise all activity related to the 4TB WD My Book drive so as to avoid any possibility of causing any further loss of data!
  • Download and try one or more data recovery tools to see if they are able to recover the data from the My Book drive.  See webpage: Easeus Data Recovery for example, or MiniTool Partition Wizard Free which includes a partition recovery option, or search for 'Disk recovery tools' on your favourite search engine for other options. 

It is possible that your PC supports using either Legacy / MBR BIOS boot and/or UEFI / GPT BIOS boot and that your clean install of Windows 10 was done using the Legacy / MBR option that does not support drives as large as 4TB (that require UEFI / GPT).  If you have another PC using UEFI / GPT then try connecting the 4TB drive there to see if the data on the drive is still all present and correct!

You could also check the same by booting the Acronis bootable rescue media in the correct UEFI boot mode.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media