I called a bunch of places, wanting to get my drive recovered. I got quoted as high as $8K to get my data back. When I asked why it was so expensive, this guy went into minute detail what they did: “see, we have to use a clean room to remove your platters and put them in a new working drive”. I thanked him for his time, hung up and went to work on replicating what he said they did, sans clean room, just canned air for cleanup before closing the drive.
It turns out there’s an atmospheric pressure rating on spinning hard drives. What likely happened was that we momentarily superseded that rating when there was a sudden surge in air pressure in the cabin. I remember my ears popping at the same time as my Mac shut off.
That probably caused the platters to wobble beyond their design and broke the motor. The arms also scratched the platters. Luckily for me, the scratch must’ve missed all the important data, other than perhaps the directory which Disk Warrior corrected.
Lesson 1: never ever erase memory cards until the client has their photos in their possession. Shoot on two cards at once, main in RAW, backups in JPGs. For added safety, FedEx yourself the backup cards separate from your flight. Yes, I’m that paranoid now.
Lesson 2: Using a computer with a mechanical drive on a flight is risky, even though everyone seems to do it totally unaware of what might happen. I travel with my iPad Pro now.
