Lost two client files in a coffee shop in Chiang Mai when my laptop battery died during a storm

The power flickered and I figured I had 5 minutes to save, but that last surge took my whole SSD before I could hit Ctrl+S, so now I backup everything to the cloud every 30 minutes with a timer on my phone. Has anyone else had a sudden drive failure ruin their whole workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

cameron_webb1mo agoMost Upvoted

Were you actually able to recover anything from that SSD with a data recovery service, or was it completely toast? I ask cause I had a similar thing happen with a portable drive a few years back, and the recovery guy told me the platters were physically scratched from the sudden power loss, which sounds like a nightmare. Did you end up paying out of pocket for a professional to try, or did you just cut your losses and move on to the cloud setup?

white.seth1mo ago

Wait did your recovery guy say platters on an SSD? SSDs don't have platters, they're all flash chips. That's a hard drive thing. Anyway, I actually had an old SATA SSD from like 2014 that died on me and I sent it to a place in Oregon. They told me the controller chip fried but the NAND chips were fine, so they basically desoldered all 8 chips and read them on a special rig. Cost me 400 bucks and I got back about 90% of my tax documents from 2016. Cloud backup after that, obviously, but for that specific case the recovery was worth it since I had a whole client folder on there.