Help, exFat formatted HDD no longer displaying files!

Hello everyone, I hope someone can give me some advice, because I have a huge issue. My wife's laptop (Macbook OSX Yosemite) was being upgraded, so she needed to backup a ton of work files and pictures of our newborn son (150 gigs or so of stuff). I, having an external HDD to spare, formatted it as exFat on my Windows 7 machine. She plugged it in and it worked fine; she was able to drag files over, open them, drag them back.

But today, she copied over a few hundred megs of work files. Then she goes to copy more, and is told "this device is incompatible", but can't tell me much more (I wasn't there and she didn't get a screen shot). Now there is nothing on the HDD. Literally nothing; no files, no folders, nothing. She can open the drive on her Macbook, there's just nothing there. I've plugged it into my Windows 7 machine and I'm also seeing nothing. According to my Disk Management, the drive is healthy, with a primary partition, and 100% HD space available for use (although the format field is blank).

Now her work stuff is easily replaced, but the pictures of our baby is something that matters a great deal to both of us. Does anyone know of a way to recover these files, or any idea what may have happened? I don't think the drive is corrupted; it mounts and ejects easily in both OS (Yosemite and Windows 7). I must confess to being an idiot when it comes to Macs, and I just barely get by with Windows, so I'm at a loss here.

Any help is MUCH appreciated!

can you transfer them back to the apple crapintosh computer and it work? have you tried putting them in another windows/linux based pc?

Thanks for the fast reply! Unfortunately both operating systems find nothing on the HDD. I no longer have a linux OS. It was her work laptop, and they (IT) upgraded the OS. That is why she wanted to backup the files. Everything seemed to copy over fine, but when she went to restore, she did one batch of work files and then--caput--Mac error message and data seems to be gone. Do you think there might be a clue in the files she successfully copied back/restored?

We are both just absolutely puzzled as what could have happened. She is terribly upset, and with good reason. 15 months of baby pics and video, seemingly gone. We probably have most of them elsewhere, but try telling that to a hysterical first time mother.

radioraheem said:

Thanks for the fast reply! Unfortunately both operating systems find nothing on the HDD. I no longer have a linux OS. It was her work laptop, and they (IT) upgraded the OS. That is why she wanted to backup the files. Everything seemed to copy over fine, but when she went to restore, she did one batch of work files and then--caput--Mac error message and data seems to be gone. Do you think there might be a clue in the files she successfully copied back/restored?

We are both just absolutely puzzled as what could have happened. She is terribly upset, and with good reason. 15 months of baby pics and video, seemingly gone. We probably have most of them elsewhere, but try telling that to a hysterical first time mother.

well more than likely there is no way to recover the files however this is a reason to make frequent backups and keep your important files in a place like google drive/one drive. if you have them elsewhere download them to a safe place I do not store important files locally. I am in IT so I would recommend not storing your personal files on your work pc.