Painful disk recovery

Learnt the hard way that storing information on a DVD is less probable to  failure than an external hard disk. I was using DVDs for storing important information a few years ago. Then, it came to a point where the number of DVDs were too much to store large folders. So, I had switched over to using an external USB disk. While I was using these disks on Linux, I had encountered no problems at all. The trouble began soon after I plugged one of the important disks into my PC running Windows 7. It went bonkers trying to handle the data.It could be  that the Linux file system drivers for FAT32 were storing data in a way that Windows 7 didn't like. All in all, the disk stopped working on both Linux as well as Windows (unformatted disk was the only error I got from Windows).

Then started the desperate measures to recover. First, of course, was the use of Linux tools followed by chkdsk on Windows. No avail. Then, went over to commercial tools such as Handy Recovery. Though the data was not that important, it was not the first time that I had encountered corrupt file systems on disks. A full weekend wasted on recovery, and only about half of the data has been recovered.

It makes me wonder if those disks are more reliable than DVDs. With DVDs, of  course, the probability that all the disks fail is quite low. With a hard disk, one corrupt partition table is enough to get rid of the entire data on the disk.