Hi everyone. I've been at this for about 9 hours already but I just needed to ask this somewhere where somebody with experience might pop up.
As usual, I left my iPhone backing up its photos and videos to a Photos library in an APFS 1TB Western Digital HDD drive. Today I woke up with an error window saying that the drive is corrupted in some way.
Here are the steps that followed:
1- Tried to mount the drive in Disk Utility -> doesn't work
2- Ran first aid in Disk Utility -> doesn't work
3- fsck_apfs with multiple different options in Terminal -> doesn't work
4- Used ddrescue to clone the corrupted hard drive to a 2TB drive -> worked fine with no unreadable/corrupt sectors.
5- I downloaded the WD Drive Utilities and the quick drive test passed -> no error.
6- Called Apple Support (shout out to Imelda for being incredibly nice and experienced) but it seems the only solution is to erase the drive or contact WD. This is not an option for me since it's got my photos library from the last decade. I had a backup in another drive but it's very out of date. I just bought a NAS to transfer it all to a safer place, so the timing for this to happen is the worst case.
7- I noticed that in the Library folder in my Mac, I got a 1.3GB Photos library with many thumbnails of the pictures I was importing last night. The filename is Syndication.photoslibrary.
Here's the log from fsck_apfs
fsck_apfs Log
After all the steps I took, it seems to me that:
A- The hard drive is completely fine hardware-wise, evidenced by points 4 and 5. So I would assume that WD can't really help me recover my data.
B- The "only" thing that's broken is the apfs_root.
So my question is if there is some sort of way to reconstruct the root tree somehow. I would assume that this structure is only partially broken and that there are addresses that it should point to properly, that can support some sort of more involved recovery process.
I tried reading the APFS documentation but I'm currently very emotionally distressed at the potential loss of my data that I can't parse that information right now.
Does anybody have any clue if something can be done about this? Some sort of script? Literally anything.
Many thanks in advance.
Best,
Andres
PS: Please let me know if this forum is the appropriate place for this question. I'm mostly posting here since I feel this is a more advanced subject and I need all the help I can get.
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