The first hour
after you lose files

If this is happening right now, read the first two sections and act on them before you read the rest. What you do in the next few minutes decides how much comes back.

Stop writing to the drive. Now.

A deleted file is usually still there. What is gone is the note saying where it is, and the space it occupies is marked as reusable. Every new file written to that drive can land on top of it.

So stop using it. Close the programs. Do not install recovery software onto the drive you are trying to recover, because installing it is writing to it. If it 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, and every further minute of spinning does more of it. Software cannot fix this and running recovery tools makes it worse. Power it down and leave it alone. This is the one case where the right move is to stop and pay somebody.

Also, when a drive asks whether you want to repair or reformat it: no. Not yet. Answer that question after you have a copy, never before.

Look in the places you have forgotten about

Before any recovery tool, spend ten minutes here. 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 and most people have never opened it.
• The bounce folder. The mix you exported to check in the car is a real file and 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, and the recording you made holding it up to a monitor.
• Anyone you collaborated with. They may have the stems you sent and forgot about.
• Cloud storage trash. Most keep deleted files for around 30 days, and most people never look.

None of these give you the session back. Several of them give you the song back, which is not the same thing but is a great deal better than nothing.

Then, and only then, try recovery software

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

Expect names to be gone. Recovery tools often return thousands of files called things like f0043712.wav, because the names lived in the part that broke. Sort by size, because a full mix is large and obvious, and be prepared to open a lot of them.

When to pay a lab

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

It is not cheap. It is also the only option that exists once the platters are scratched, and every hour the drive spends powered on before then lowers the odds.

Afterwards

The boring answer is the one that works. Keep the work in more than one place, and make one of those places somewhere that is not in the room with you. A drive on your desk and a drive in a bag beside it are one flood, one theft and one spilled drink away from being the same drive.

Whether that second place is us, another service, or a disk at a friend's house genuinely does not matter for this. What matters is that there is one.