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Appreciation post: my $6 USB drive saved a client's tax files after their SSD died
Had a client call in a total panic on April 12 because their only work laptop would not boot past the logo screen, and they had 7 years of tax records on it. I pulled the drive, stuck it in my USB adapter, and the whole thing showed up as RAW, so I ran a recovery scan right there on my bench in Tacoma and got about 40GB back in under an hour. What is your go to move when a drive shows up RAW instead of just dead, do you scan it in place or clone it first?
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claire_gibson2d ago
Ngl my go to move is usually the dumb one first, which is me staring at the screen going "well that's not good" for way too long before I actually do anything. After that little pity party, I clone it first if the drive is even halfway alive, because scanning in place on a dying drive is how you turn a recovery into a funeral. Raw usually means the file table got wrecked, not that the data is gone, so I image it to a known good drive and run the scan on the copy every time. Saves you from making it worse if the heads are on their way out. That said, if the drive is totally unresponsive and I just need something fast like your tax guy did, I'll take the risk and pull what I can, but I know I'm rolling the dice.
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