External hard drive missing files

I have lost access to thousands of important documents which I had backed up on to an external hard drive.

I have a HGST Touro 1 TB portable drive which I re-formatted to use on my MacBook Pro. I then copied all my work folder data onto the portable drive, triple checked that the files were there and could open from the drive source. It was all fine. Then ejected the disk properly and gave my laptop to our technician who was re-formatting them for our new server upgrade. When I got the laptop back (now erased), I went to re-install my work documents, but the main folder was missing. Used Disk Utility to check the drive - it said that everything seemed fine. However, it did say that there are over 1,700 folders and over 6,000 documents taking up 39 GB space. This is considerably more stuff than is actually visible on the drive. The only thing left of my "Work" folder is an alias folder. I can't see a list of my files anywhere, but INFO says they are there.

Help!!! Would really appreciate some advice on how I can locate these files and retrieve them.

First thing.... stop using the hard drive. Download recovery software and use it from a bootable DVD or flash drive. Here are some suggestions (note: all are expensive)....

Data Rescue 3

Disk Warrior 4

Data Recovery Software Review

Misuse of the term "backup". This external disk is your primary store and you have no backup.

chscag said:

First thing.... stop using the hard drive. Download recovery software and use it from a bootable DVD or flash drive. Here are some suggestions (note: all are expensive)....

Data Rescue 3

Disk Warrior 4

Data Recovery Software Review

Click to expand...

A 4th option is Disk Drill. The nice thing about this one is you can use it to see if you have recoverable files before paying for it.

EDIT: Thinking about this a little more, I think DiskWarrior may be the best option here. We don't seem to be simply looking at deleted files, but a much deeper problem with the file system or directory. You can try screening for the missing files with Disk Drill, but you may need DiskWarrior to do a full volume rebuild.

How did you backup the drive? Use cloning software at all?

Thank you for some of the replies. Yes, I do realise that I have 'misused' the word backup because I made that my primary source. Not a tech, obviously.

No, I didn't use cloning software - I dragged and dropped the data into the external HDD.

No, I haven't used the drive since. Yep - my feeling is that this is directory related, not that the files are deleted. Somewhere they are occupying some space - I just don't know how to recover them.

Thanks for any constructive advice on this. I will investigate Disk Warrior.

Formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?

Also have a read of this link on copying to an external:-

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2540455?start=0&tstart=0