Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

Frequent topic here is the failure of a hard drive and loss of data.
If a drive fails catastrophically: motor fails, head crash, all the screws come out LOL. There may be nothing to do but wish you had another backup--or spend your life savings with a recovery company.
However, with 99% of drive problems, go to Gibson Research and buy and use a copy of Steve Gibson's program, Spinrite. It will recover and restore an amazing number of drive failures.

I have been using Spinrite since the 1990s and it has saved my tuchas on several occasions.

Gibson has several products, but Spinrite is the King of the hard drive world.

Collie lover Loc: St. Louis, MO

There is a program called Card Recovery that does an excellent job.

pistolpete

I know this is not what you want to exactly hear, but you really should store redundant copies either across computer/laptop and then also external backup unit or run a RAID system for backup. Iffy HD with a spinning disk has a failure of the read arm there ain't no software gonna fix that unit...you'd need the expensive recovery option. A 1TB external backup can be had for <$100 on sale. JMTC

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

PHRubin Loc: Nashville TN USA

Unfortunately, I doubt any program could save the data on my failed hard drive, it stopped spinning!
Fortunately, I have an external hard drive where I daily backup my data (but not programs). It only took a few hours (and 2 or 3 issues to resolve) after I replaced the drive.

BTW - I use SyncBack and have it do background backups. Needless to say, I let my computer run 24/7.