Lost all data!

[assouptro]

Hi Stargazers 

A lesson learned, I guess. 
my capture laptop M.2 nvme drive just died this evening

I was setting up a new rig after my equipment was damaged in the storms recently and my laptop decided to show the message “no bootable disk”

I removed the ssd and put it in a caddy to check it

It cannot be seen by my other laptop, I’ve checked with 2 caddies 

I have months of unprocessed data, all of my capture programs, pixinsight, astropixel processor, photoshop, and several other programmes on it that will take me days to re-install and train, not to mention the lost image data 

I am so frustratedly angry that I didn’t back the laptop up. Or as a minimum transfer the image data to a separate drive 

I don’t think it’s recoverable. 
I have reached out to a company that claim to be able to repair m.2 drives but looking at reviews I’m not hopeful. 
 

Has anyone got any advice (beyond, backing up data?)  

I'm not having a lot of luck recently 

Anyway, rant over 

Bryan  

[Dr_Ju_ju]

That's one of  the problems with silicon drives, they just fail with no warning  unlike spinning rust, which usually give you some warning.....

I don't save anything locally, on the imaging computers, but directly on a pair of Synology, network attached storage devices which mirror each other.

[Elp]

This is unfortunate. It is one of the reasons RAID was invented but most people don't use it. You can split data across multiple drives to boost performance or have said data duplicate to multiple drives.

[Shimrod]

3 hours ago, Dr_Ju_ju said:

That's one of  the problems with silicon drives, they just fail with no warning  unlike spinning rust, which usually give you some warning.....

I don't save anything locally, on the imaging computers, but directly on a pair of Synology, network attached storage devices which mirror each other.

 

55 minutes ago, Elp said:

This is unfortunate. It is one of the reasons RAID was invented but most people don't use it. You can split data across multiple drives to boost performance or have said data duplicate to multiple drives.

Although you are protected from a single disk failure using these approaches, there is still a risk of physical failure - of the whole device, power surges, theft etc. I back up in this manner, but also use a cloud back up service. You could set up some simple scheduling and copy to OneDrive (if you have an MS Office licence) which will give 1tb of storage.  I've used backblaze for quite a few years now to back up my server. This is very much a backup service, not a cloud drive, but it is cheap at $99 per year (black Friday discount code BLAZEITUP23 gets 20% off) and you can also restore versions of your files for 30 days/1 year depending on subscription. A small utility runs in the background to automatically update to the cloud service.

This isn't going to help the OP restore the data, but it can help avoid future data loss. Other companies offering similar services include Acronis, Carbonite and Crashplan.

[Earl]

1 hour ago, Elp said:

This is unfortunate. It is one of the reasons RAID was invented but most people don't use it. You can split data across multiple drives to boost performance or have said data duplicate to multiple drives.

Never seen a raid in a laptop.

An automated backup option is essential if you dont use cloud storage (which i would also backup)

I would always make a weekly full drive backup (image) so you can do a full restore and also the same after any major system changes.

I dont save any user data (and if i do by accident it gets moved) on my Boot drive its always another physical drive, internal, external or NAS

Edited November 25, 2023 by Earl

[Elp]

Ah, didn't realise. You would have thought considering the price of storage it'd be a good feature to include. Backing up essential stuff then is the only option, if it's very important then onto multiple drives, critical things keep a copy drive off site.

[assouptro]

Thanks to all that have shared their thoughts 

Backup, Backup, Backup seems to be the consensus 

Has anyone had anh success with data recovery from an m.2 Drive? 
 

cheers

Bryan 

[Adreneline]

I have successfully used this in the past:

https://www.r-studio.com

They claim it can recover data from NVMe type storage devices although I have no experience of that - as yet!

https://www.r-studio.com/How-to-recover-NVMe-device.html

 

[Shimrod]

1 hour ago, assouptro said:

Thanks to all that have shared their thoughts 

Backup, Backup, Backup seems to be the consensus 

Has anyone had anh success with data recovery from an m.2 Drive? 
 

cheers

Bryan 

I have recovered data from disk drives in the past (both SSD and mechanical) using r-studio that @Adreneline has mentioned above. It all depends on what has failed on the drive  - you mention that it cannot be seen by other laptops when mounted in a caddy. Is this not seen as in 'can't seen any physical disk at all' or just 'can't see the formatted drive'? The screenshot below shows  part of the disk management screen (search create and format hard disk partitions in windows) with allocated drive letters. If the disk can be seen but shows as 'unformatted', it could just  be the partition data or MBR has been damaged and that might be recoverable. If nothing shows for the disk, it most probably indicates a physical failure (or a defective caddy - you might want to check with another disk). 

 

 

[assouptro]

2 hours ago, Shimrod said:

I have recovered data from disk drives in the past (both SSD and mechanical) using r-studio that @Adreneline has mentioned above. It all depends on what has failed on the drive  - you mention that it cannot be seen by other laptops when mounted in a caddy. Is this not seen as in 'can't seen any physical disk at all' or just 'can't see the formatted drive'? The screenshot below shows  part of the disk management screen (search create and format hard disk partitions in windows) with allocated drive letters. If the disk can be seen but shows as 'unformatted', it could just  be the partition data or MBR has been damaged and that might be recoverable. If nothing shows for the disk, it most probably indicates a physical failure (or a defective caddy - you might want to check with another disk). 

 

 

Thanks 

I have 2 caddy’s and 3 m.2 drives (including the one that is in question) 

I tried disk management last night and it doesn’t even register in the list in either caddy 

I’ve exhausted all I can do as a layman and I as wondering if anyone has had experience with drive recovery via a business that claims to be able to recover data (at cost) 

I would probably throw a few hundred £’s at the drive if I thought it could be recovered but couldn’t justify a grand or more as I could buy a new swanky laptop for that

I’m weighing up the pros and cons

Downloading all the programs and training the ppec and  focus routine offsets etc when I get so few clear nights is  nearly enough to make me consider changing hobbies! 

That’s on top of the loss of data that I haven’t processed as far back as June! 
 

I’m really disheartened. 
This hobby gives great personal rewards but when things go wrong, really wrong, it’s devastating 😢