Folder contents disappeared from NTFS Drive

[Franuck]

I'm using a 2Tb Seagate Backup Plus drive, which is NTFS formatted and Paragon's "NTFS for Mac OS X" installed.
I'm using this mainly for photo and video images and a few weeks ago, the two main folders that I use disappeared. After rebooting my Mac and connecting, ejecting and reconnecting the drive several times I noticed two new folders, (IMG_1234.JPG and IMG_2345.JPG) in the top folder.
After rebooting and reconnecting the drive, these disappeared and the missing folders returned. All was well again. Until yesterday.
It's happened all over again, finally my 2 original folders returned, but when I opened them (one for still images, the other for video), there was no content!
I've done a number of things, like using Disk Utility's First Aid and used Onyx to try and rebuild the directory on the drive, but the data remains inaccessible.
I'm hoping there's some way I'll be able to simply restore everything as it was, as the many, many video files are all tagged and mapped to Final Cut Pro libraries and projects.
I know that the files are on the drive, as there's 1.34 Tb of data on the disc, which consists almost entirely of files contained within the 2 missing folders.
Any suggestions on how to fix this would be gratefully received!

 

[Raz0rEdge]

It is almost never a good idea to use NTFS for an external drive to start with. If an external drive needs to be shared amongst Mac's and Windows machines, then ExFAT is the format that should be chosen. If an external drive is being used exclusively (and guaranteed to be so) with a Mac, then you an go HFS, but ExFAT is almost always the right answer..

Anywho, you should ensure that you are running the latest version of Paragon's NTFS software. Folders/files don't appear and disappear from media unless you specifically delete/move them. Just plugging in and out the drive shouldn't change what appears and what doesn't..

If you have another large drive around, I'd format that at ExFAT and move data over to it and then reformat this Seagate as ExFAT for future use as well..

 

[Franuck]

Thanks, Ashwin. Interesting and useful info for the future. Hoping I can find a way to rectify this.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

One thing you might try is to take the drive and plug it into a Windows machine if you have access to one, that should reliably tell you if the data is intact and accessible. If not, hopefully the Windows tools can resolve any breakage..

 

[Franuck]

One thing you might try is to take the drive and plug it into a Windows machine if you have access to one...

Thanks for the suggestion, Raz)rEdge. I did have a friend run the drive with CHKDSK on their Windows machine, but it didn't resolve the issue. Ouch. Wound up running a recovery program which found a lot of the missing files, but without their original names (which means a tedious manual process of trying to fix), bought another drive, formatting it to Mac Journaled and once I've copied the main folders there, will reformat the original drive as well and sync the two so that I've got a copy.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Yeah the recovery programs are essentially finding bits and pieces of a file and try to combine them but don't know what it should be called or how many pieces there are, so you end up with a jumble of names and potentially missing pieces..