Question: I have a great collection of movies that I had stored in a logical mesh of folder on my 3.5 tb WD personal cloud drive. I woke up 1 morning and found that everything was fine with my data on this drive, except for my movie collection: There were two great folders, one "2sort" nd the other "segregated". out of all the segregated sub folders, only letter C D and 2 or 3 others remain. and the 2 sort folder, which has umpteen subfolders, amounting to more than 0.5 tb. is.. it's just gone!!

this is a great downfall..

now this is a personal cloud drive and has no usb port etc. unfortunately to hardwire and recover files..

now I'm sure there are softwares out there that can help me recover my beloved movies from such an interestingly "hard-to-reach" (should I say?) device? what may that software be compadre, my happiness lies within your answer.. thank you..

remember, recovery software or (WD) personal cloud. :)

these ovies were All, "hand-picked", over the course of ten years.. I just never catalogued my collection.. if I could just get the "list" of my lost collection, that'd be enough.. recovering em would be a bonus.. but they out to be damaged if I were to somehow recover you know? still, I'm certain they're all intact.. I guess the file index just got corrupted.. There surely is a veil of some sort that need to be thrown or pushed aside to reveal my movies.. what software can do/does that? thanks immensely!

Answer: 
If the data is something that you can't live without you should probably send it in to a professional.

But if you want to DIY, I agree with MonkeyZeus. Dismantle to get at the SATA. 

I'm sure there are tons of free and paid programs out there. You should do some research on them and find one that sounds good to you.

I like the EaseUS data recovery wizard. You can check it out [here](http://www.easeus.com/resource/drive/sata-drive.htm). They give you some info and it has a pretty good walk through on using their free recovery program. 

\*\* I am in no way affiliated with EaseUs \*\*
As with the others, I would recommend removing the disk and connecting it direct to your computer. You can get hardware that lets you mount "naked" drives very cheaply.

Then run a testing and recovery tool on the drive to make sure that everything is working correctly.

My personal favourite is [Spinrite](http://www.grc.com) but it isn't cheap at around USD90. However, it does work miracles on barely running drives. Might take a long time to run though so be patient. I've seen it take 3 weeks!! to recover a large drive with lots of problems. Of course, it cannot always work but it will recover absolutely everything it can and it keeps at it, constantly repositioning the heads to have another go at getting even a small part of the data and putting it all together.

Assuming you manage to recover the data - back it up!! If you have a reasonable Internet connection there are plenty of "unlimited" space backup services such as [CrashPlan](http://crashplan.com) that are not too expensive.

Also, don't trust to RAID no matter what people say. When using consumer grade disks RAID is often more of a liability than a help. With RAID1 corruption can be written to both disks. It is better than nothing but a disk with a solid backup is better. Spend on backups before spending on RAID.