Most of what makes a recovery expensive happens after the drive fails.

The drive gives out. There is a bad half hour. Things get tried. By the time it reaches me, the job is twice what it would have been.

None of these are foolish. They are all reasonable things to try. They are just wrong in this one situation, so here they are.

Do not keep restarting it.

This is the big one. The machine will not boot, so you restart it. It fails again, so you restart it again. You get to eleven attempts.

A failing drive has a limited number of reads left in it. Every boot spends a pile of them on Windows files you do not care about. If the eleventh attempt is the one that finishes the drive off, your photos went down paying for a boot sequence.

One try. If it fails, turn it off and leave it off.

Do not let it repair itself.

Windows offers to scan and fix. Startup repair offers to run. chkdsk offers to fix errors. All of these write to the drive, and the writing is the problem. chkdsk on a failing drive can take blocks it cannot read and mark them as free, which is how a file that was recoverable at nine in the morning is not at ten.

Do not format it, however politely it asks.

You plug in the drive and Windows says it needs to be formatted before you can use it, and there is a nice button offering to do it now. That is the most expensive button in this business. It does not mean the drive is blank. It usually means Windows cannot read the index that says where everything is. The files are still there. Format writes a new empty index over the top of the old one.

Do not run recovery software on the failing drive.

There is good recovery software out there, and it has a place. That place is not a drive that is dying.

Recovery software scans a drive hard. It reads every corner of it, repeatedly, for a long time. On a drive with a bad motor or failing heads, an eight hour deep scan is eight hours of stress on the thing you are trying to save, and a lot of drives do not survive it. Some of that software also wants to write its results back to the same drive, which overwrites what it just found.

If the drive is healthy and you deleted something by mistake, recovery software is the right tool. That is a different situation and it has a different answer.

Do not put it in the freezer.

This comes up more than you would think. It was a real trick on certain drives thirty years ago and it has lived online ever since. On a modern drive it adds condensation to the inside of a sealed precision device. If there was any chance of a clean recovery, the moisture ends it.

Do not take it apart.

Not the drive, and carefully not the enclosure. A hard drive is sealed against dust for a reason. Opening one outside a clean room means a speck of dust landing on a surface that spins at seven thousand revolutions a minute with a head floating a hair's width above it. That is the end of the platter and the end of the data.

Enclosures are safer but not free. I covered that yesterday.

Do not wait and see.

Waiting is not neutral. A drive that is degrading keeps degrading whether or not you are using it, and a drive that is clicking gets worse every time it is powered on. The window I wrote about on Monday closes on its own.

What to do instead, all of it.

Turn it off. Leave it off.

Write down what you need from it, because that shapes the whole job. Photos and documents are one problem. A machine that has to boot on Monday morning is a different one.

Then bring it in while it can still be read.

Why this is worth the restraint.

If your files come off a drive that still reads, it is straightforward and it is cheap. If they have to come off a drive that has stopped, it is a lab, a clean room, and a bill I hate quoting. I wrote about what that costs in July.

The distance between those two outcomes is usually the first hour.

Tomorrow: how the files actually come off, and what order it happens in.