Can anyone help a complete idiot salvage my lost photos

[dssr]

Please ignore my earlier post.

I have a 500GB external USB drive that is bitlocked. The drive is half full of photographs, some video and various files (PDF, Word etc). I connected the drive last week and it was fine, then the following day it disappeared from explorer. From information across the net, it looks like my partition has been lost, damaged, or whatever happens to it.

Hence, posting here.

I have a drive containing photos of my grandchild who suffered irreparable brain damage a few months after birth. so before I take out loan to have the data recovered, can anyone on here walk me through the process with testdisk and photorec. I have no experience in these matters whatsoever

So far, testdisk has not worked (chances are I’m using it wrong) and Photorec can only find a few files with .SWF, .qxd and other suffixes I’m not familiar with. There are around 65,000 files on the drive.

I would be grateful if any help, even if it was confirmed I had lost the lot. At least I could move forward

[recuperation]

The TestDisk package cannot help you to decrypt your disk or partition.
Please contact a professional recovery service.

If your disk is dammaged your Bitlocker key may not be sufficient to decrypt content. Similar to Truecrypt or Veracrypt where you can back up crucial decryption information "header backup", a possible destruction of key sectors on your disk will require a "recovery key".

Recent hacker findings regarding breaking Bitlocker encryption might require that recovery information.

[dssr]

The TestDisk package cannot help you to decrypt your disk or partition.
Please contact a professional recovery service.

If your disk is dammaged your Bitlocker key may not be sufficient to decrypt content. Similar to Truecrypt or Veracrypt where you can back up crucial decryption information "header backup", a possible destruction of key sectors on your disk will require a "recovery key".

Recent hacker findings regarding breaking Bitlocker encryption might require that recovery information.

I have the BitLocker Drive Encryption recovery key,. From what you've said it will be of no use to me when using Testdisk or any commercially available recovery application?

When I bitlocked the external drive, I saved all the identifier and recovery information.

[recuperation]

I have the BitLocker Drive Encryption recovery key,. From what you've said it will be of no use to me when using Testdisk or any commercially available recovery application?

The TestDisk package cannot help you to decrypt your disk or partition.

Again, TestDisk does not support the proprietary Bitlocker encryption - regardless if you have a recovery key or not.
I do not comment on "any commercially available recovery application", because

1. I could never guarantee you that I know them all
2. I have no experience with commercial solutions.

[dssr]

I assumed it would be an issue to recover.

Nonetheless, thank you for you time and response