[edwinyzh]

> modern technology is literally erasing our pasts

It's not modern technology that's erasing our pasts, but cloud-based services owned by someone else. So I'v always keen on local software - for instance, I'm currently upgrading my was staled desktop mindmap software (http://innovationgear.com/mind-mapping-software/) ;)

[Kerrick]

Modern technology erases it too. I am already seeing the drives that I used in college to store my raw camera files and LR catalogs degrade to the point of not being able to read the data as I try this month to move them to fresh storage. For some of my oldest photos, I only have whatever processed JPGs I happened to upload to a cloud provider that stuck around this long. The silver-based negatives from my film work at that time, though, are still fine.

[wholinator2]

Might be a long shot, but GRCs Spinrite has saved a couple drives of mine. It won't work if there's a problem with the physical connection to the drive but almost everything else it can fix (at least momentarily) and actually grants a nice speed boost in the process for drives that have gotten too messy.

[dsl]

Aside from all the flashy handwavy marketing "technospeak" what SpinRite actually does under the hood is re-read each bit from the disk thousands of times and then see if it gets more 0s or 1s.

It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.

These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.