Hard Drives & SSDs
Your Drive Shows as Unallocated: What That Actually Means
Unallocated usually means the partition table is gone, not the data. Here is how to tell the difference and what to do…
Category: Hard Drives & SSDs
Internal and external HDDs, SSDs and NVMe — from RAW volumes to dead enclosures.
Hard Drives & SSDs
How Long Do Deleted Files Actually Survive? A Practical Timeline
Deleted does not mean gone, but the window is shorter on some drives than others. What actually determines whether your file is…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Recovering Data From a Dead Laptop: Pull the Drive First
If the laptop will not boot, the data is usually fine. The mistake is trying to fix the laptop before rescuing what…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Recovering a VMDK or VHDX That Will Not Attach
A virtual disk is just a file, which is good news and bad news. Here is how to get data out of…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Files Deleted From Google Drive for Desktop: Where They Actually Went
Drive for Desktop streams files rather than storing them, which makes "deleted" mean three different things depending on what you did. Here…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Recovering From an Encrypted APFS Volume When You Have the Password
Encryption does not make recovery impossible, but it does change the order of operations. Do it in the wrong order and you…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Ransomware: What to Try Before You Consider Paying
Free decryptors exist for many families, snapshots survive more often than assumed, and many strains delete the originals rather than encrypting in…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Wiping a Drive Before You Sell It, and Proving It Worked
A quick format is the most recoverable scenario there is, which makes it a poor disposal plan. Correct methods for SSDs versus…
Hard Drives & SSDs
Deleted Files on a Mac: APFS, Time Machine Gaps and What Actually Works
Most Mac recovery advice predates APFS, TRIM and hardware encryption. What still works, where Time Machine has gaps, and why internal SSD…
Hard Drives & SSDs
NAS and RAID Data Loss: When Recovery Software Helps and When It Cannot
A degraded array is not a normal recovery job. Why you should not rebuild until you know the cause, which failures software…