BlueBell50 wrote:
I transferred around 6gb of data from a 4tb external HDD to a 14tb external HDD. The files transferred perfectly but all other files on the 4tb have disappeared. The 4tb now shows 155.73gb available space (4.03gb purgeable) and 3,848,596,766,720 bytes (3.85 TB on disk) used.
I've run the disk through Disk Drill which found nothing and the missing files did not turn up in the bin.
Have I lost the files forever or is there something else I can try?
well hard to say whats what here....on your external drives.
3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.
More than one device, more than one backup methodology— and backup regularly.
What I can say is many external drives bought off the shelf come pre-formatted with proprietary backup software installed...especially those that market as "Mac ready" or some such....and typically charge more.
A drive is a drive— the advice is to erase/reformat/initialize any drive as new with the DiskUtility.app to ensure you have removed any preinstalled software— if that is part of your issue or not, hard to speculate.
ref: Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support