M.2 SSD Data Recovery

savage362

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 16, 2003
1,389
Vermont
Back in October, I left my laptop on overnight to let Outlook work on indexing over 100k emails. I came in the next morning and the laptop would not boot to the login prompt. I powered off, and turned it back on and it would not load the OS. As a result, I lost a lot of pretty important work stuff along with about a years worth of emails. A lot of the lost files I had backed up in 2017 so I still had old versions of them, but obviously prefer the newer, more recent versions which are not easily recreated.

Lesson learned. My laptop is running an m.2 SSD. Our onsite System Engineer attempted to recover the data from the drive using several software options which failed each time. Does anyone have any experience using a data recovery service? Horror stories? My company is looking for quotes but with all of the company's I've found, they want to physically see the drive before providing a quote and having to send the drive to several locations and get it back seems to be asking for trouble.
 

mwonow

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 4, 2005
7,095
I've had pretty good luck with a local (to Toronto) data recovery service (CBL), but fwiw, my understanding is that recovery has much higher odds with mag disks, and that data from SSDs can't be restored in the same way. Sorry about that - maybe someone who's deeper than me will have better news.
 

gtmtnbiker

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
1,724
Who is your email provider? If you're using outlook.com or gmail hosted, your emails should be in the cloud.

If you're using Exchange, I would hope that all of your emails are stored on the server.
 

savage362

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 16, 2003
1,389
Vermont
Who is your email provider? If you're using outlook.com or gmail hosted, your emails should be in the cloud.

If you're using Exchange, I would hope that all of your emails are stored on the server.

Exchange through Outlook 365. Once emails are downloaded locally, the server mirrors my inbox so when something is deleted, it's gone. Same for archiving locally - once it gets moved to the archive, it's removed from my mailbox on the server. There is the online archive now with 365, but this was all before that became an option.