Q: Looking for hope in restoring my iMac
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Sep 11, 2016 8:22 AMby steve626,HelpfulSome things you can try:
* Open Finder Preferences (under Finder menu, upper left of your screen). Make sure that under the General tab, that the boxes are checked for Hard Disks and External Disks, to show them on your Desktop. Otherwise they will not be visible.
* Try a new cable. The cable may have gone bad.
* Open Disk Utility when the drive is connected. Can you see it on the left side panel of Disk Utility? If you can see an external drive, try to Mount it in Disk Utility. If you can mount it, are the files available? If not, you can run Disk Utility to try to repair it.
* Seagate has data recovery services. http://www.seagate.com/services-software/recover/ First, you can download their software and try it for free. If it can find files on the disk, you would then purchase the license to their recovery software to use it to recover your files from the Seagate disk. Alternatively, they can perform the data recovery for you (for a fee). The details are on this link.
Sorry this happened, I wish you good luck. It sounds like your problem does not stem from Time Machine, which is actually a pretty good backup program; but rather, your external drive seems to have a problem. This does happen to all drives eventually, none last forever, and for this reason I try to keep at least two backups, each with a different method. For instance, one with Time Machine, the other using a "clone" type software (such as SuperDuper, CCC etc.). It's good you were using the Cloud at least. I hope you can recover your files.
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Sep 10, 2016 11:46 PMby Massimo Lombardo,You can also try to connect the drive @ another USB port. Sometimes by crashes where the USB connection are involved the port is not more responding by the system. I have had a similar problem for many years (but the drive was not the TM drive) and I solved with plugging in another USB port.
ciao
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Sep 12, 2016 10:27 AMby Stanley Taylor1,Your answers were very helpful. However, it turns out the backup external HD developed a problem as well as my iMac HD and won't mount. So I can't use any recovery software like what Seagate offers, since it can't see the external HD. Seagate is expensive, starting off at about $500.00. Best Buy has a Level 1 recovery that might work ($250.00). But they insist I must bring in my iMac so that they can put any recovered data on it. Now I'm not sure that helps. Since Time Machine does incremental backups, how much of the backup file has to be restored? And is it possible to store it in a guest account on my iMac and then migrate files back from it? Or would I have to copy the backup from the iMac onto a new external HD, and then migrate files back? I'm just not sure how this works, but Best Buy can't transfer it to another external HD, even if they are able to retrieve it. Advice?
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Sep 12, 2016 11:10 AMby Stanley Taylor1,I attached the affected external HD to my wife's iMac, and it won't mount there either. Best Buy did a quick check and told me that there was a problem, they could not immediately see any data, although the drive was spinning and showing other signs that data may be there. Perhaps I'll investigate Seagate's again and see if I can just try the $500.00 restore, but just bite the bullet if they can't recover the data that way. It's a lot of pain to lose all that. The probability of the iMac's HD, and the backup time machine external drive both dying at the same time is, I hope, low. But I'm sure going to use cloud services much more in the future.
