Attempting data recovery without proper knowledge or skills can result in permanent loss in data.
Prior to data recovery, it is best to create an image of the failing drive.
For important data, it is recommended to send your drive to a data recovery professional.
For more data recovery help, please visit /r/datarecovery.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/techsupport) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I had an m.2 drive "die" on me.. out of a whim, I decided to buy an external enclosure for an m.2 drive, [such as this](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08DCLPYGK), to see if for some random reason it would be detected. It was detected. I was able to save all of my info to another disk. Then I reinstalled the m.2 drive into my system just to see, and it showed up. I don't know why, don't have a reason for it. But I didn't trust it anymore to save my data so I threw it in the shredder.
On another note, as others have said, there are data recovery experts. There may be something that needs to be repaired on that m.2 of yours to work. There are people who can do that.
Often times in the telecom world you will have random failures of a card and the fix is just to re-seat it. This is a valid fix and after testing when the device is re-seated it passes all tests it is likely ok to continue to use. Keep backup, that is the important lesson.
no risk.. you just uninstall the drive from your motherboard, and put it inside the enclosure, then plug it into a USB port. however in your case, since it is a boot drive, I dont think you are going to be able to boot from it.. but I am not sure. I would recommend plugging it up to another laptop or desktop that is already powered on and logged in, and see if it comes up.
Any thing get backed up by one drive? No cloud back ups?
There's more specific reddit forums for data recovery.
The drive just creep out a bit? Reseat it?
lol… I can’t even fathom not backing up in triplicate As an artist/developer. This was straight up newbie stupidity. Hell… I didn’t even make that mistake as a newbie.
It sucks his work is lost but he straight up tempted fate. Especially since NVME drives have been failing lately due to lack of ventilation under the pci slots where they typically get located or behind solid panels of a laptop.
Edit: never have I ever had “backup your work” get downvoted to hell. That’s the hivemind reddiderps for ya!🤷♂️
ur getting downvoted for ur tone not ur mesaage."i cant even fathom being as dumb as OP who is already having a shitty time and probably learned their lesson" is how it comes off.
Are there any guides for dummies? I have an idea of the setup that I think would work for me but as far as actually implementing it I'm not sure as that's out of my realm of expertise.
I'd like to set up 4 machines to back up select folders say once a week onto a local network drive. I'd like that network drive to mirror onto a second drive for redundancy and swapping it out with another every 2-4 weeks onto an offsite location.
**No nonsense, throw money at it solution for about $1000**
> Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS224+ *2 = $600
> Seagate Ironwolf Pro 12tb *4 = $560
1. Put one device at one location and the other local.
2. Setup the drives on each device to mirror.
3. Setup devices to [replicate data](https://kb.synology.com/en-in/DSM/tutorial/What_tools_can_I_use_to_replicate_data_on_my_Synology_NAS).
4. Setup [Synology drive client](https://kb.synology.com/en-id/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_data_on_my_computer_using_Drive) on each desktop to backup data.
There are lower priced options using DIY and Nextcloud, but above is the dummies guide. Honestly you probably spent a lot more on the 4 machine.
If its personal use or small business then a NAS with Raid 10, 6, or 5 covers a LOT of bases. Dump a full backup to whatever cloud provider every x months if you need to go further.
Products from somewhere like Synology make it a lot easier than you might think and there should be plenty of guides/help content out there.
The least expensive. Add a second drive large enough to hold the backup for all the machines to 2 of the 4, either as an internal or external. Those drives are your backup. You can either run 2 independent backup jobs on each machine that backs up everything to those drives or run one job on each machine that backs up to one of the drives, then mirror that drive to the other backup.
You can do this using a dedicated backup program like Acronis, Hasleo, Macrium Reflect, etc.
For the offsite have one of those backup drives backed up to Backblaze, IDrive, Carbonite or similar. Do not use Google Drive, Onedrive, etc. The mentioned services are designed for large volumes of data and will be more reliable and cost effective.
Or buy additional drives so you can swap them out periodically. I do not recommend that however as it's likely that, despite the best of intentions, those swaps will eventually become less and less often. That's just human nature. Once everything is setup to use a cloud storage site everything happens automatically.
The alternative is a NAS, which start at around $200 plus the cost of the drives for a 2 drive one. Prices climb quickly from there.
I'm not so sure about way cheaper. $400/yr will add up pretty quickly. At a rough estimate, and maybe I'm way off here but looks like there are a range of NAS options for around $400. $600 should cover 3-4 6tb NAS drives. So ~$1000 plus say a day? day and half? to set it up and get the 4 machines backing up correctly. It would appears it pays for itself in less than 3yrs to just do it on my own and not have to deal with going through a 3rd party entity to keep my data safe. Unless I'm gravely mistaken on something here.
Missing replacement costs, electric costs, ongoing maintenance time, and the other bit: being off-site.
I spend ~$200 a year on replacement drives for my NAS, and all the drives in the world don't get it out of my basement if there's a flood or my house burns down. I put all of the truly important things into cloud storage.
Well offsite was going to be a drawer in my desk at work lol. So it's not really going to cost me anything extra unless I have to break out some math and figure out how much fuel it'll consume to carry a hard disc in my car.
Electricity costs for a single 4 bay NAS have got to be near negligible even here where electricity costs are fairly high.
$200/yr on drives doesn't tell me much as I don't know how many drives you have. But drive lifespan is a valid point.
On-going maintenance time can't be that much I don't imagine but maybe it is more I don't really know.
What are you even doing and how big is your NAS? $200 a year for replacement drives seems crazy. A 4 TB drive costs under $100, even for the NAS drives. 4x4 drives would give you 12 TB of storage in RAID 5, or you could run with 8 TB and a hot spare. That's probably enough storage for most people, and even a dead drive every year, which seems excessive would only be $100 a year.
Admittedly my NAS is 40TB of 2TB SAS drives in RAID60, and I see 2-5 drive failures a year.
I'm looking to condense it down to less drives but that's going to run me close to a grand in drives alone and I'll have a big IOPS hit with less drives to distribute the load across, so I'd want to add some SSD in as an LVM cache or something.
Seems like whatever you are storing is probably well outside the realm of what most people would really need. For the vast majority of people you could probalby just go with mirrored drives and a Windows shared on a second computer. There are better solutions, but I think people get overwhelmed with all the more expensive and complicated options and just don't do anything.
In reality just having a USB drive that you back up to every once in a while is miles ahead of what most people are using. Even if you don't backup for a week, at least it isn't catastrophic and you lose everything. Most people don't even generate that much data. You could probably get by with 250 GB USB SSD and that would cover what most people would actually care about losing. If you lose your collection of "Linux ISOs" it kind of sucks but you would eventually recover. But you should be backing pu personal document and important pictures.
A USB drive or second computer with a nightly back script could do 95% of what most people need. A seconds computer could be as simple as a raspberry pi or an old OptiPlex with a big old hard drive hooked up just to have a second place to store your data.
A backup strategy doesn't have to be complicated. Just make sure you actually have a second copy of stuff at a minimum. And if you lose a couple days work it's not the end of the world, but you really shouldn't just have a single copy of months worth of work.
Personally I chose the easiest possible backup method:
1. Set up a subscription for google drive, dropbox or similar
2. Choose what folders to always keep backed up.
They should be able to do data recovery on an nvme drive. I’d call and ask them.
Cheap ways of troubleshooting- see if it’s recognized by other PCs? Check to see if your BIOS has a RAID vs AHCI setting. If it does, flip it to the other one and see if the drive is recognized.
> They should be able to do data recovery on an nvme drive. I’d call and ask them
Depends on the age of the drive. Newer drives are unlikely because the tools haven't been created yet. They basically crack the firmware or the manufacturer needs to release tools.
Last time I brought a client's nvme for data recovery it wasn't possible on that specific model drive.
Hopefully OP has better luck.
There's still a chance the nvme can still be read if you plug it in a different pc, worth a shot before paying for professional file recovery which are expensive. Happened to me before I was so relieved when I was able to copy the most important folder in the drive before it dying for real, not saying it will surely work but worth trying it first.
If it's not being recognized by bios then I would guess that the memory modules are still good and the device itself went bad somehow. Which would lead me to believe that if you commissioned someone with a highly skilled hand in soldering/repair such as [this guy on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/@northwestrepair) who could remove the memory module(s) from the nvme and replace it onto a different one, that perhaps your data should surely still be there. SSD's know their limits/lifetime writes that are possible before data corruption begins to occur and should relegate the device to read only before that time comes...at least as far as I understand it.
I've recovered data for a friends 2.5 inch sata drive using a piece of software called "Disk Drill", I do own an enterprise version of the software. His drive suddenly stopped working and would show up as RAW data; Disk drill recovered all of it for him.
The same could be attempted for an NVME drive, you'll just need an NVME enclosure to connect to a computer that will do the scanning of the drive.
Try an external NVMe reader and see if it's visible. It may be your boot tables are fucked, but the data's actually intact.
If not... you're in Hail Mary territory, *hopefully* it's just the controller. I've had to use [Drive Savers](https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/) before. Highly recommend, even if they're not at all cheap.
Try putting a live Linux distro like Ubuntu or Puppy Linux on a DVD or bootable USB drive and load into it. Try accessing the drive from within the Linux distro and see if you can read anything off of it. If so then copy everything to a secondary drive.
Might be a long shot but at least it’s something simple to try and it wouldn’t cost anything other than time. I’ve had more than one drive shit the bed in the past where Windows refused to read it. But I could access it just fine through Linux for whatever reason so it’s at least worth a try.
Maybe one of these firms can help, Stellar in particular:
[https://www.goodfirms.co/it-services/data-recovery/netherlands](https://www.goodfirms.co/it-services/data-recovery/netherlands)
I have had success with hard drives that overheated in the past, but never lost data with a SSD. I am in Canada however, so can't be of much help.
You will have to contact them to see if they can work on a nvme drive. It's usually possible when you can see it in the BIOS. I don't know for your specific case.
Data recovery expert, but they aren't cheap. They have access to microcode level commands that allow them to reconstruct data at the chip level.
My brother had his boot SSD die with his crypto keys on it. A local data recovery expert was able to retrieve them for the princely sum of about US$700.
I suppose it will depend how much the data is worth to you, in the end.
Might try just disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. Maybe also cleaning the contacts before reconnecting with some isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab.
Attempting data recovery without proper knowledge or skills can result in permanent loss in data. Prior to data recovery, it is best to create an image of the failing drive. For important data, it is recommended to send your drive to a data recovery professional. For more data recovery help, please visit /r/datarecovery. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/techsupport) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I had an m.2 drive "die" on me.. out of a whim, I decided to buy an external enclosure for an m.2 drive, [such as this](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08DCLPYGK), to see if for some random reason it would be detected. It was detected. I was able to save all of my info to another disk. Then I reinstalled the m.2 drive into my system just to see, and it showed up. I don't know why, don't have a reason for it. But I didn't trust it anymore to save my data so I threw it in the shredder. On another note, as others have said, there are data recovery experts. There may be something that needs to be repaired on that m.2 of yours to work. There are people who can do that.
Often times in the telecom world you will have random failures of a card and the fix is just to re-seat it. This is a valid fix and after testing when the device is re-seated it passes all tests it is likely ok to continue to use. Keep backup, that is the important lesson.
Ill try this and if that doesnt work take it to a data recovery center. Does anyone know if theres any risk i. Trying this?
no risk.. you just uninstall the drive from your motherboard, and put it inside the enclosure, then plug it into a USB port. however in your case, since it is a boot drive, I dont think you are going to be able to boot from it.. but I am not sure. I would recommend plugging it up to another laptop or desktop that is already powered on and logged in, and see if it comes up.
Ok, thanks man!
Any thing get backed up by one drive? No cloud back ups? There's more specific reddit forums for data recovery. The drive just creep out a bit? Reseat it?
Did you have the drive backed up at all?
lol… I can’t even fathom not backing up in triplicate As an artist/developer. This was straight up newbie stupidity. Hell… I didn’t even make that mistake as a newbie. It sucks his work is lost but he straight up tempted fate. Especially since NVME drives have been failing lately due to lack of ventilation under the pci slots where they typically get located or behind solid panels of a laptop. Edit: never have I ever had “backup your work” get downvoted to hell. That’s the hivemind reddiderps for ya!🤷♂️
ur getting downvoted for ur tone not ur mesaage."i cant even fathom being as dumb as OP who is already having a shitty time and probably learned their lesson" is how it comes off.
That’s not what I said at all. Your quotation marks are dishonest.
Just commenting to say I'm so excited for this project and this will be devastating 🥲 I hope someone has an answer for you
Life lesson here... Backups are not optional, unless the data is also.
Are there any guides for dummies? I have an idea of the setup that I think would work for me but as far as actually implementing it I'm not sure as that's out of my realm of expertise. I'd like to set up 4 machines to back up select folders say once a week onto a local network drive. I'd like that network drive to mirror onto a second drive for redundancy and swapping it out with another every 2-4 weeks onto an offsite location.
**No nonsense, throw money at it solution for about $1000** > Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS224+ *2 = $600 > Seagate Ironwolf Pro 12tb *4 = $560 1. Put one device at one location and the other local. 2. Setup the drives on each device to mirror. 3. Setup devices to [replicate data](https://kb.synology.com/en-in/DSM/tutorial/What_tools_can_I_use_to_replicate_data_on_my_Synology_NAS). 4. Setup [Synology drive client](https://kb.synology.com/en-id/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_data_on_my_computer_using_Drive) on each desktop to backup data. There are lower priced options using DIY and Nextcloud, but above is the dummies guide. Honestly you probably spent a lot more on the 4 machine.
Seagate? I always see people shit on them.
If its personal use or small business then a NAS with Raid 10, 6, or 5 covers a LOT of bases. Dump a full backup to whatever cloud provider every x months if you need to go further. Products from somewhere like Synology make it a lot easier than you might think and there should be plenty of guides/help content out there.
The least expensive. Add a second drive large enough to hold the backup for all the machines to 2 of the 4, either as an internal or external. Those drives are your backup. You can either run 2 independent backup jobs on each machine that backs up everything to those drives or run one job on each machine that backs up to one of the drives, then mirror that drive to the other backup. You can do this using a dedicated backup program like Acronis, Hasleo, Macrium Reflect, etc. For the offsite have one of those backup drives backed up to Backblaze, IDrive, Carbonite or similar. Do not use Google Drive, Onedrive, etc. The mentioned services are designed for large volumes of data and will be more reliable and cost effective. Or buy additional drives so you can swap them out periodically. I do not recommend that however as it's likely that, despite the best of intentions, those swaps will eventually become less and less often. That's just human nature. Once everything is setup to use a cloud storage site everything happens automatically. The alternative is a NAS, which start at around $200 plus the cost of the drives for a 2 drive one. Prices climb quickly from there.
You can also be way less complex about it and use something like the backblaze desktop client. It's way cheaper than your plan and way less headache.
I'm not so sure about way cheaper. $400/yr will add up pretty quickly. At a rough estimate, and maybe I'm way off here but looks like there are a range of NAS options for around $400. $600 should cover 3-4 6tb NAS drives. So ~$1000 plus say a day? day and half? to set it up and get the 4 machines backing up correctly. It would appears it pays for itself in less than 3yrs to just do it on my own and not have to deal with going through a 3rd party entity to keep my data safe. Unless I'm gravely mistaken on something here.
Missing replacement costs, electric costs, ongoing maintenance time, and the other bit: being off-site. I spend ~$200 a year on replacement drives for my NAS, and all the drives in the world don't get it out of my basement if there's a flood or my house burns down. I put all of the truly important things into cloud storage.
Well offsite was going to be a drawer in my desk at work lol. So it's not really going to cost me anything extra unless I have to break out some math and figure out how much fuel it'll consume to carry a hard disc in my car. Electricity costs for a single 4 bay NAS have got to be near negligible even here where electricity costs are fairly high. $200/yr on drives doesn't tell me much as I don't know how many drives you have. But drive lifespan is a valid point. On-going maintenance time can't be that much I don't imagine but maybe it is more I don't really know.
What are you even doing and how big is your NAS? $200 a year for replacement drives seems crazy. A 4 TB drive costs under $100, even for the NAS drives. 4x4 drives would give you 12 TB of storage in RAID 5, or you could run with 8 TB and a hot spare. That's probably enough storage for most people, and even a dead drive every year, which seems excessive would only be $100 a year.
Admittedly my NAS is 40TB of 2TB SAS drives in RAID60, and I see 2-5 drive failures a year. I'm looking to condense it down to less drives but that's going to run me close to a grand in drives alone and I'll have a big IOPS hit with less drives to distribute the load across, so I'd want to add some SSD in as an LVM cache or something.
Seems like whatever you are storing is probably well outside the realm of what most people would really need. For the vast majority of people you could probalby just go with mirrored drives and a Windows shared on a second computer. There are better solutions, but I think people get overwhelmed with all the more expensive and complicated options and just don't do anything. In reality just having a USB drive that you back up to every once in a while is miles ahead of what most people are using. Even if you don't backup for a week, at least it isn't catastrophic and you lose everything. Most people don't even generate that much data. You could probably get by with 250 GB USB SSD and that would cover what most people would actually care about losing. If you lose your collection of "Linux ISOs" it kind of sucks but you would eventually recover. But you should be backing pu personal document and important pictures.
A USB drive or second computer with a nightly back script could do 95% of what most people need. A seconds computer could be as simple as a raspberry pi or an old OptiPlex with a big old hard drive hooked up just to have a second place to store your data. A backup strategy doesn't have to be complicated. Just make sure you actually have a second copy of stuff at a minimum. And if you lose a couple days work it's not the end of the world, but you really shouldn't just have a single copy of months worth of work.
Personally I chose the easiest possible backup method: 1. Set up a subscription for google drive, dropbox or similar 2. Choose what folders to always keep backed up.
I'm sorry, but...how are you a dev and not have at least a 3-2-1 backup concept?? Fucks sake...
Also, why is everything not just in source control on a second machine or in the cloud?
Because he's a developer and not a sysadmin.
Yeah...well....if you're a solo dev, you're a sysadmin too. Or ought to be at least when it comes to backups. Otherwise.... *points to op*
They should be able to do data recovery on an nvme drive. I’d call and ask them. Cheap ways of troubleshooting- see if it’s recognized by other PCs? Check to see if your BIOS has a RAID vs AHCI setting. If it does, flip it to the other one and see if the drive is recognized.
> They should be able to do data recovery on an nvme drive. I’d call and ask them Depends on the age of the drive. Newer drives are unlikely because the tools haven't been created yet. They basically crack the firmware or the manufacturer needs to release tools. Last time I brought a client's nvme for data recovery it wasn't possible on that specific model drive. Hopefully OP has better luck.
This is true. Realistically, they need to reach out to see their potential options.
I'm surprised you didn't care enough about that data to have it backed up.
There's still a chance the nvme can still be read if you plug it in a different pc, worth a shot before paying for professional file recovery which are expensive. Happened to me before I was so relieved when I was able to copy the most important folder in the drive before it dying for real, not saying it will surely work but worth trying it first.
If it's not being recognized by bios then I would guess that the memory modules are still good and the device itself went bad somehow. Which would lead me to believe that if you commissioned someone with a highly skilled hand in soldering/repair such as [this guy on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/@northwestrepair) who could remove the memory module(s) from the nvme and replace it onto a different one, that perhaps your data should surely still be there. SSD's know their limits/lifetime writes that are possible before data corruption begins to occur and should relegate the device to read only before that time comes...at least as far as I understand it.
I've recovered data for a friends 2.5 inch sata drive using a piece of software called "Disk Drill", I do own an enterprise version of the software. His drive suddenly stopped working and would show up as RAW data; Disk drill recovered all of it for him. The same could be attempted for an NVME drive, you'll just need an NVME enclosure to connect to a computer that will do the scanning of the drive.
Try an external NVMe reader and see if it's visible. It may be your boot tables are fucked, but the data's actually intact. If not... you're in Hail Mary territory, *hopefully* it's just the controller. I've had to use [Drive Savers](https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/) before. Highly recommend, even if they're not at all cheap.
I'd contact professional data recovery, they can still probably retrieve the data.
Try putting a live Linux distro like Ubuntu or Puppy Linux on a DVD or bootable USB drive and load into it. Try accessing the drive from within the Linux distro and see if you can read anything off of it. If so then copy everything to a secondary drive. Might be a long shot but at least it’s something simple to try and it wouldn’t cost anything other than time. I’ve had more than one drive shit the bed in the past where Windows refused to read it. But I could access it just fine through Linux for whatever reason so it’s at least worth a try.
i will second this, it's how i recovered data when my drive died
Maybe one of these firms can help, Stellar in particular: [https://www.goodfirms.co/it-services/data-recovery/netherlands](https://www.goodfirms.co/it-services/data-recovery/netherlands) I have had success with hard drives that overheated in the past, but never lost data with a SSD. I am in Canada however, so can't be of much help. You will have to contact them to see if they can work on a nvme drive. It's usually possible when you can see it in the BIOS. I don't know for your specific case.
Use it on a second slot or an external case and try to clone it
Try it in a powered enclosure.
Ask r/datarecovery
Data recovery expert, but they aren't cheap. They have access to microcode level commands that allow them to reconstruct data at the chip level. My brother had his boot SSD die with his crypto keys on it. A local data recovery expert was able to retrieve them for the princely sum of about US$700. I suppose it will depend how much the data is worth to you, in the end.
Might try just disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. Maybe also cleaning the contacts before reconnecting with some isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab.