Hard drive Data

I haven’t spoken about saving your computer’s hard drive data to a backup lately, so there, now I have.
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All hard drives fail. Today’s hard drives are really just a little card with a chip on it that stores your data. It’s fairly amazing. A failed hard drive, whether mechanical or solid state isn’t recoverable by the likes of me. That said, a ‘broken’ computer, even if you know it’s a problem with the hard drive, may have recoverable data on the drive. I have dealt with computer repairs where the hard drive has failed or is failing, or Windows is massively corrupted, but the data has still been recoverable. Sometimes not, I’ve had those as well.
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Recovering data from a hard drive usually requires taking the drive out of the computer and attaching it to my computer using an external drive enclosure or cable/converter. For ‘standard’ SATA drives that was enough, but as I mentioned, newer computers have a card that is the drive, and those can vary. I do have 3 types now and have recovered data from several drives already.

On the new MacBooks, that’s not an option because the hard drive is actually soldered right onto the motherboard, as is the memory. That makes them impossible to upgrade, and also to repair, at least for me. Apple isn’t the only manufacturer doing that, so whatever laptop you order, make sure you can either upgrade it yourself, or that it is robust enough to last you whatever time you think you will need it for.