PLEASEHELP. Used Balena to back up 18tb external HDD to second 18tb external HDD, power failure during transfer now neither drives are mountable to my Mac OS- please help!- this is my life's work in video files

Product support
1

I thought Balena would be great for creating a proper ground up clone- and help secure against future corruption.
Was trying to do a thorough back up and may have really shot myself in the foot.

After looking through the forums I’m starting to see that Balena may not have been the right software for such a large back up.

What happened (exactly):
-accumulated all my data onto a WD elements 18TB External HDD

(A)
-used terminal command to triple check I was choosing the right source
-started to flash to 2nd “WD elements 18TB External HDD” -
(B)

  • at 15% a cleaner came and closed my laptop and moved the power cables , potentially killing power to Hardrives.

  • it showed an error message in balena “something’s gone wrong”

  • I re-booted, checked my original (precious file holding) HDD… all files present and correct.

  • performed first aid to be safe. came back positive

  • repeated steps above " (A)—to—(B)" and re-started process

left over night (was at 40% when left)

– another powerful failure!! - MacBook charger somehow got loose in the night so laptop must have turned off

-This morning (current situation) . Both drives are unmountable.
Readable only as “disk2S2” , greyed out, in side bar of disk utility.

Don’t want to do anything further without advice, please help. Much much appreciated.

Specs at bottom:

Questions:

  1. does flashing affect the source ever?
    (99.9% sure I used the correct source using the terminal to find HDD names; but just on the off chance I messed up the second time around)

2)If I flashed the wrong way, is it in anyway recoverable (I’m sad to know in my heart that this is not the case, due to Balena’s block by block flashing process)

  1. I’m still able to run first aid, but am scared to

  2. what do you think could have happened here (assuming I flashed the right way both times; which I’m pretty damn sure I did, just being thorough about fail points.

  3. please advise next steps

(PS: I know I’m an idiot, if it doesn’t exist in 3 places etc… this was me trying to rectify that, and hit a hurdle on step one grr)

Thank you so much

Cem Aytacli,
desperate filmmaker/editor

macOS Catalina
MBP 16-inch 2019
2.3 GHz 8-core INTEL core I9
64GB DDDR4

2x WD elements external HDD, 18TB, desktop with own power. (12v DC)
Cables: “MicroB-Usb >> to >> USB-C”

2

Hello!? I see that you’re responding to there posts… can a dev please advise

3

Hello, balena Etcher is a good choice for cloning a drive, but probably not as the first step in a backup strategy. In the future I’d recommend looking into incremental backups, perhaps to a USB external drive among other steps. I realize that doesn’t help in your current situation, so let’s review your questions:

does flashing affect the source ever

The drive selected as a source in Etcher should not be affected in any way - it is just being read from. I can’t answer the “ever” part since there are infinite scenarios, but I have not heard of a source being affected. I suppose if a drive is damaged in some specific way, just reading from it could conceivably affect it though.

If I flashed the wrong way, is it in anyway recoverable

It depends on how far the flashing (cloning in your case) process reached. I suppose there are software tools and utilities that might be able to recover parts of the drive that did not get cloned. But otherwise the source data is written bit-for-bit to the target drive, overwriting whatever was there.

what do you think could have happened…

It’s tough to say based on this information, but pulling the power twice probably did not help. Perhaps it caused data corruption unrelated to the cloning.

please advise next steps

I’m not familiar with the Mac but in general it sounds like you need to have the source drive examined. Does First Aid have a non-destructive diagnostic functionality that can check the drive? If you did not clone over the drive, then it could be coincidentally failing for some other reason or corrupted in some way and that needs to be determined. I’ll ask any colleagues who are more familiar with the Mac to post any further suggestions if they have any.