1 of my external hard drives became damaged overnight(still dont know how) and it appears the usb port is broken off from the core
seagate expansion 2tb bought from newegg ages ago no warranty and i dont want to send it in for repair anywhere at the risk of the hard drive being wiped

someone please help as this has all my work stuff on it(im a cpa so you can see why this is important)

The good news is that typically these types of external drives are just casings with a regular hard drive hidden in them, plugged in to a converter. I don't know your model offhand, but with the warranty expired and people's personal data all over it, you're probably just going to have to take the chance and pry it open.

Assuming the drive itself is okay, then once you retrieve it it's a pretty simple matter to get an external drive bay or just plug it directly into your computer and get your files. I can't speak to your specific model but a quick Google leads me to believe your Seagate isn't any different.

I'm not going to be the guy to tell you to do it, just throwing the option out there. Provided the hard drive itself is undamaged though all you need do is retrieve it safely from the casing and you're fine. Depending on the connections a simple USB dock will do the trick as far as getting to your files. I use this one.

However being a CPA and all, you need a solid long-term solution for local backups, it's not a big investment relative to the importance of your data. There's a fellow accountant in my area that had an actual drive failure, he had to ship it off to a special recovery service at a tremendous cost, they actually opened the hard drive itself to do it. Not the way you want to go. Even going with two hard drives and the device above you'd be in good shape, it would work just like a backup drive only you could swap any drive in and out of it as needed.

any ideas if there are hidden screws like they have on the 750gb one or do i have to just pry it open

I have a seagate expansion. They have a part that pulls off the bottom and you can switch output types - esata/usb3.0/firewire. Does yours do this?

no i ended up busting my hands and a screwdriver up pretty good to pry the top part off and found so much already loose shrapnel that was way too small to be repaired and did find that indeed the usb port had jarred loose and was the larger item bouncing around inside

got the hard drive out of there and just ordered this
http://www.amazon.com/iPRO-1-Externa...pr_product_top

so hopefully by tomorrow all the issues will be resolved

Don't forget to find a spare drive to back up this one, as it is you probably just dodged a bullet with the enclosure breaking, as opposed to the drive failing. That's still bound to happen sooner or later.

In fact someone at my office just snapped the SATA connector clean off a solid state drive. Honestly I'd get that data backed up immediately somewhere safe given its importance, while you wait for a drive.

And by somewhere safe, let me recommend somewhere online. If you're backing up to an external drive, what happens if you get robbed, or your place burns down?

If you're a one man shop, i'd look into something along the lines of mozy.com or backblaze.com. If you have more employees, i'd contact a local IT company and talk over your options with them. The last thing you want to do is lose your data!

ive looked into online backup and most dont provide enough space at an efficient price for me

also side question
is making your own externals now economically sound due to the spike in branded externals due to last years floods in thailand

Look into backblaze. It's unlimited storage. How much are you backing up? I've sent 4TB up there without any issues.

And no, the spike in the price is due to the drive itself so buying a drive and an external case might save you a few bucks, but it's not really worth it in my opinion if you run into any warranty issues.

Also worth considering the sensitivity of the data you're trying to protect. At the minimum I'd consult someone who knows what they're talking about regarding your possible liability for it, in the event that client data were compromised at an online backup service. I wouldn't upload anything anywhere until knowing for sure, if your data is anything like mine there may be more to think about before uploading that kind of information to a 3rd party. If it were movies or photos sure but that's a little different.

Of course that's a consideration, but with any major online backup company they should offer the option to use your own encryption key.

alright got my enclosure today but it came with only the usb cable and power supply so i just need a sata cable to hook the hard drive up to it correct?

For online backup im using carbonite..unlimited at about 59 a year. I tried back-blaze and it seemed to bog my system down, even after the initially backup/upload. Weird issues when it was installed, just lagged/slowed things down.
I uninstalled it and everything went back to normal..YMMV

bump to find out what kind of connector cable i need to connect the hard drive to the enclosure

someone please help

post a link to the enclosure you bought. but i don't think you should need a connector cable. if we're using the term enclosure the same way, there should be a sata port built into the enclosure board