Seagate
 

How can I tell what info is on my Seagate external hard drive?

Connect it with a USB cable. I can read any disk drive with Linux.

The drive should have a USB cable which came with it. Connect the drive to your PC and you should be able to view the contents with File Explorer (aka. Windows Explorer). It will probably be listed as drive E: or some letter near that. (Depends on what else you have plugged in).

The Seagate external HDD is basically just a really big thumb drive/ memory stick.

Similar process if you are using a MAC.

Agree
Plug & Play


(some show as portable storage or external storage)

Are you having a problem with the external drive?

If you used Windows backup, the files are not stored in a normal fashion, I believe they are compressed. I am not a big fan of windows backup, so I am not sure how to determine what is actually stored in these compressed files. If you used a Seagate software for backup, take a look at their instructions, they may have a way to view files.
Hope this helps.

If it is your backup, please take it to someone that knows how to read it.

Lots of variables - macOS, Windows, Linux - which program wrote to it, is it encrypted or compressed or in a proprietary format and on and on.

If you are worried about someone finding porn on it, just use a hammer and then throw it away.

Any Luck???

Plug it in and use file explorer.

If the files were created using the Seagate backup program, try this:

Where can I find my backup files?

Open (My) Computer/This PC.
Open the Backup Plus drive.
Open the Toolkit folder.
Open the Backup folder.
Open the folder that is named after the computer that was backed up.
Open the C folder.
Open the Users folder.
Open the User folder.

All storage devices have info on them even after they have been deleted. Deleting only removes the pointers to the information making that space available for reuse. Formatting the hd may work for most people's data however a triple pass rewrite of the entire hard drive has been the go to for total erasure.
Purchase of an adapter cable from usb to the bar drive will allow you to see files based on its available methods. Most files allow you to "hide" files. While used and apparently effective it will not hide it from those who know.
There are methods that can.be used to recover lost data in particular when it says.disk cannot be read.
.....SynchronyNet.....

Lol - if you are worried about that, a hammer is of little use if the platter survives. Less destructive would be a Department of Defense level wipe of the drive, reformat and reuse it. If you really want to destroy the drive, get a 3/8ths drill bit and drill about 8 holes around the outline of the platter. That effectively prevents reading the platter by other parties.

I've read BleachBit works well also.

Seagate Drive
 

If you have an Apple device, plug it in with the cord that came with it into any USB port and go to finder. If you scroll down you will find it then click on it to open it.