The first hour
after you lose files

Is this happening right now? Do the first two sections before you read the rest. The next few minutes decide how much comes back.

Stop writing to the drive. Now.

A deleted file is usually still there. What is gone is the note that says where it is. The space it sat in is now marked free. Any new file written to that drive can land on top of it.

So stop using it. Close your programs. Do not install recovery software onto the drive you are trying to recover. Installing it is writing to it. If this is your main drive, and you can shut the machine down and work from another one, do that.

If the drive is making a noise, switch it off

Clicking, ticking or grinding means physical damage. Every minute it keeps spinning does more of it. Software cannot fix this. Running recovery tools makes it worse. Power it down and leave it alone. This is the one time the right move is to stop and pay somebody.

When a drive asks whether you want to repair or reformat it, say no. Not yet. Answer that after you have a copy. Never before.

Look in the places you have forgotten about

Spend ten minutes here before any recovery tool. People find what they lost in this list more often than they expect.

• Your DAW's backup and autosave folder. Most write one every few minutes. Most people have never opened it.
• The exports folder. The mix you rendered to check in the car is a real file. It still exists.
• Sent email. Anything you ever sent anyone is a copy you still have.
• Chat threads. The 2am voice note to yourself counts.
• Your phone. Voice memos. The recording you made holding it up to a monitor.
• Anyone you worked with. They may have the stems you sent and forgot about.
• Cloud storage trash. Most keep deleted files for about 30 days. Most people never look.

None of these give you the session back. Several give you the song back. That is not the same thing. It is a lot better than nothing.

Then, and only then, try recovery software

Run it from a different drive. Write anything it finds to a third one. Never recover a file back onto the disk you are recovering from.

Expect the names to be gone. Recovery tools often hand back thousands of files called things like f0043712.wav. The names lived in the part that broke. Sort by size. A full mix is large and obvious. Be ready to open a lot of them.

When to pay a lab

If the drive is physically damaged, stop and send it to a data recovery company. Do the same if what is on it is worth more than the cost of the attempt. Prices vary a lot. The good ones diagnose for free and charge only if they succeed. Ask for that arrangement by name.

It is not cheap. It is also the only option left once the platters are scratched. Every hour the drive spends powered on before then lowers the odds.

Afterwards

The boring answer is the one that works. Keep your work in more than one place. Make one of those places somewhere out of the room you are in. A drive on your desk and a drive in a bag beside it are one flood, one theft, one spilled drink away from being the same drive.

That second place can be us, another service, or a disk at a friend's house. For this, it does not matter which. What matters is that there is one.