Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB External SSD MKV and MP4 files disappear?

[eustas1]

I have a large Hong Kong 1980s-90s film collection on mostly blurays and some dvd that I am in the process of ripping the MKV files (MakeMKV) and the mp4 (Handbrake) and saving the movies onto my Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB external SSD, but I am running into this issue where after I have saved the files, I will take a look a few days later and notice that the movie files are gone without a trace even though I saw them there and opened them just previously. It appears like the MKV/mp4 files disappear without any warning, and since I have about 170 films on the SSD by now, I have no idea what's missing unless I cross reference every movie title individually.

This is incredibly maddening as some of these films are out-of-print and incredibly rare, and to see them disappear off my SSD without notice is frustrating after I've sold and shipped them on eBay. I have the Sandisk Extreme Pro 4tb SSD plugged into my 2018 Macbook Pro and everything seems up to date. Does anyone have any clue what is going on? I just installed the "RescuePRO File Recovery Utility" software from Sandisk but I don't know if my files are lost forever or if this software will end up wiping my entire SSD of all my movies.

[Timelord]

Question: did you buy it very cheap ?
I think that you are scammed.
4TB drives for 30 Euro are NOT real !!!.

If you can rad or translate dutch, see here:

https://tweakers.net/reviews/10434/een- ... press.html

[danield1993]

If the drive is real, these drives usually ship pre-formatted as exFAT. As you're using a Mac, I would recommend reformatting it to macOS Extended (JFS+) or APFS if you're not going to use the drive with Windows or another external non-Apple device as I have had plenty of past issues where files and folder contents will just disappear from exFAT formatted drives when managing it using my Macs. The drives I used (and am still using) were not faulty or fake, it just seems that Macs have issues with the exFAT (and possibly FAT) filesystems, probably because they're not as error-protected.

If you do need Windows or other device compatibility, there is software out there to support NTFS on a Mac as macOS only has read support for it. I have never used these myself so I don't have any recommendations, I would definitely advise to look at reviews before using a solution to make sure it's not going to cause issues.

There's no direct option to convert an exFAT drive to NTFS, macOS Extended or APFS as far as I'm aware, you'll need to move the files off of the drive, format it and then move them back.

I would recommend backing up the drive regularly so you always have two copies in case one disappears since you're not keeping the original media. External HDDs are quite cheap so you could probably easily pick up a 4TB external HDD and use that as your second copy for the files you're storing on the SSD.

[dcoke22]

In the world of backups, one is none and two is one.

Like danield1993 suggests, you need a backup. Backing up to a spinning hard drive is fine. I wouldn't mess with a 4TB model when 14TB models can be had relatively inexpensively, certainly for less than you paid for the 4TB SSD.

[smokewagon]

Funny. They're fake drives being sold Amazon claiming to be 16TB. They are actually 64GB. As new data gets written to drive its deletes older data to write newer data. watch linus tech tips you tube. This may or may not be the case for you though. Either way I'm sure its very frustrating for you. And yes more than one BKUP (and not all on SSD)sketchy.

[Woodstock]

But this IS an external drive intended to back up disks. What's your point?