Recovery Guides & Resources
Practical, plain-English advice for the moments after data loss: what to do, what to avoid, and when to call a professional.
Hard drive clicking? What to do, and what not to do
A clicking hard drive is usually a failing read/write head. Here's what causes it, the mistakes that make it worse, and the safest next steps.
Read guideRansomware · 8 min readRansomware attack: what to do in the first 24 hours
A calm, practical checklist for the first day of a ransomware incident: containment, evidence, backups, notifications and recovery options.
Read guideNAS & RAID · 7 min readSynology says "Volume Crashed": what it means and what to do
What a crashed Synology volume or storage pool means, which common reactions make it worse, and how data is recovered from SHR and Btrfs arrays.
Read guideSSDs & flash · 6 min readSSD not detected? Why SSD recovery is different from hard drives
Why SSDs fail without warning, how TRIM and encryption affect recovery, and what to do when an NVMe or SATA SSD disappears.
Read guidePhones · 5 min readDropped your phone in water? Save the data first
What to do in the first hour after water damage, why rice doesn't help, and how photos and messages are recovered from phones that won't turn on.
Read guideCrypto · 7 min readRecovering a crypto wallet from an old drive, and how to avoid recovery scams
Where old wallets hide, how to protect a drive that might hold one, how legitimate wallet recovery works, and the warning signs of crypto recovery scams.
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