Recovery Of .nki, .nkb, .nkx, .nks Files: Is It Possible?

Annabelle

When I woke up Friday morning, May 27, 2022, I thought I was dreaming when suddenly, I heard it! My samples hard drive, the one with all my virtual instruments on it, suddenly started flashing on and off, and after a few repetitions of that cycle, it shut off completely! Now the samples drive isn't even connecting to my machine. Stranger still, the model number, which I don't remember all of it, but it usually starts with "ST31000", now displays as a number that starts with "STM13". How did this happen? We actually lost power in my apartment complex that day, so I wonder if that may have shorted out the power in this hard drive. I'm hoping I can still retrieve the samples off of there before it possibly goes belly up! It's amazing that that particular hard drive has been with me since the day I got my music machine, September 2, 2011! I've just recently purchased a new 6 TB Western Digital Black hard drive from B&H Photo And Video in New York City for $159.99! Now all I have to do is wait for my sighted friend, Markus (Yes, that's "Markus" with a "K", not a "C"), to come over and help me with makin' the switcharoo when the time comes that he's available to help me put it in. If I can't retrieve the samples myself, which I'm sure most folks will say is not a good idea if there's possible mechanical failure, I'm sendin' the drive in to Drivesavers! Mark gave me a quote that the price will be between $700 and $3900! Sure that's spendy, but it's worth it for me, as a few of the samples on there are ones I've made, and some of the instruments are ones I customized. Drivesavers did say that they could recover .wav files, which are also included on this drive, but they tell me that things like .nki, .nkb, .nks, and .nkx files are of a proprietary format. Now I'm confused!

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If Drivesavers can save an entire series of episodes of "The Simpsons" as well as an entire series of raw sessions from an album by The Rolling Stones, surely they can help to save my precious files, some of which aren't exactly replaceable! I hope the noises my hard drives make are not a sign of data damage or mechanical failure. If they are, what shall I do next? If the folks at Drivesavers are able to save every single "lost" file I have, for the love of San Francisco that will be my dancin' day! Then I'll be makin' music like never before! My sight challenged friend, Glenn, who actually builds computers (I know, you might say that's impossible when you can't see), says that the sound my hard drive is making, from the attachment I'm providing you in this email, is the sound of stuck heads. He tried to suggest that I put it in the freezer, but I don't think that's a good idea, as it could possibly introduce condensation in the machine, even if it's in an antistatic bag. What shall I do next? Here's an example of the actual sound from my actual hard drive. I recorded this with my Olympus LS100 field recorder next to my computer, while restarting the machine from a shutoff state. Listen to this and tell me if you think this is mechanical failure that could lead to data loss.

Hard Drive Flash On and Off Then Shut Off.zip

Simchris

You may be able to use EASEUS data recovery software to scan the drive and recover data to separate hard drive. I did this with a failed RAID array when hardware failed and borked both drives. Got back 90% of lost data.

also be aware lifespan of hard drive is 5 years or 3.5 years for heavy daily use with stuff like email, photoshop, etc.

using external hard disk dock super helpful for this task.

JesterMgee

Yeah that is the sound of a dead drive. Could be anything but it's not something you ever wanna hear if you only have data on a single drive.

Data recovery is EXPENSIVE as hell, could easily cost you $2k+ to recover a whole drive. Probably more tho.

With the MANY pretty cost effective online backup options available (I use iCloud, GDrive and BackBlaze to backup my data) there should be no reason to place trust in untrustworthy mechanical drives.

Sorry to say the chance of recovery is probably slim, my sister lost 4 years of her kids digital lives including the birth because of a failed USB drive (knocked over by one of the very same kids as it was used for everything) and we were not able to do anything to recover any data. Still have the drive just in case, but unlikely.

Start looking into backups. $90 odd a year is worth the insurance.

Tony Jones

There's no substitute for multiple backups and even offsite to the cloud if needed. If you've a mechanical defect it may well have damaged the surface, making recovery 'very challenging.'

Back in the 80s I had customers with disc drives the size of washing machines, and only holding megabytes. We had an engineer once got to fix a system where the disc stopped working and made noises. You had to take out the disc platter and the heads were part of the unit. He swapped the platter to the other disc drive, while putting the client's only other disc in the first machine. Both times without using mirrors and equipment to look for damage (the surface of the disc would scratch).

You guess it. Both drives and both discs now destroyed. Needless to say the engineer was told not to report for work next day.

We all now have too many files / VSTs / samples... and I suspect most people hardly back up anything.

EvilDragon

Yeah it's a crapshoot with HDDs... SSDs should be a lot more durable (mine are fine for 8th year in the row now).

Annabelle

I don't mind paying $2,000. Hey, I'd be willing to pay $1,000,000,000,000,000 if I have to! The thing I don't understand is how a loss of power could cause a hard drive to fail.

EvilDragon

Could've been a power surge, that would then fry the motors inside the spinning drive. This stuff is super sensitive.

Annabelle

I wonder if something like "Get Data Back" would be good for recovery of what would otherwise be considered "Proprietary formats" by companies like Drivesavers.

Simchris

Good to have pc/mac plugged into both battery back up and furman power conditioner. And as noted good time for back up strategy with hdd, ssd and cloud.

if drive will mount without click of death, try free version of easeus data recovery. If nonstop click of death you need recovery service. They will migrate platter to new drive assembly for same drive type then see if it mounts. Videos on youtube about that process.

i didnt listen to sound, but if common seagate buzzing from stuck heads, data recovery person might do a fix like this video https://youtu.be/Z2IHGqmDXlA

Annabelle

Is it true that formats like .nki, .nks, .nkb, .nkm, and .nkx are considered proprietary? As opposed to things like .mid, .mp3, .ogg, .wav, .doc, and .html, which Drivesavers seems to consider "universally understandable" formats? :confused:

EvilDragon

Those are proprietary formats, yes. But data is data, really.

You could also try something like Piriform Recuva, but your system needs to be able to see the drive in order to scan it.

softigger

I was really worried when I realized that a large number of files had been deleted from my work PC. I wasn't sure if I would be able to get them back. Thankfully, I heard about Partition Recovery - Show More and decided to give it a try. The program worked perfectly and I was able to recover all of the deleted files.