FreeAgent Products

[grigor]

I had not used my 320G FreeAgent Pro for a few months. Now I can't find my files. I had many archives on that disk. But now I see only a WINDOWS forlder with a few system files in it. All my archive directories are gone. Last time I used it was OK.

Do you know what the problem is? Have you encountered similar issue?

[AskTheLeaf]

Were the files created on the same computer that you now have the FreeAgent attached to? What types of files were the ones you are no longer able to see? Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer to see if they then appear?

Also, make sure you set up your operating system to show all files and folders:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Show-hidden-files

[grigor]

The files where created on multiple computers and I tried accessing with different computers. The files were anything - pictures, videos, pdfs, executables...

Of course I enabled showing hidden files and folders. It shows that free space is almost 320GB, which means the drive is almost empty. But I had many gigabytes of files.

What could happen?

I had my family photo archive there and wedding videos.  And now they are gone... Does this mean I should never ever rely on Seagate products...

[AskTheLeaf]

Thanks for the update on the situation.

It's hard to pinpoint what exactly caused the files to disappear from your drive, it could have been anything from malware to data corruption or possibly the drive itself. 

Data recovery software will be a good option at this point to see if you can recover your files. There are several free data recovery software versions available on the internet [ those are non-Seagate ], or you can check out ours, which is located here:

http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/consumers/file-recovery-software/

It would also be good to test the drive with our SeaTools diagnostic software to find out if it's working properly:

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/