[jacamera]

Great story! This had me confused though:

> Often I'd show up only to tell them their hard drive was dead and everything was gone. This was just how things worked before iCloud Photos, nobody kept backups and everything was constantly lost forever.

Why not suggest sending the drive off to a recovery service? They certainly existed back then, wealthy clients could afford it, and you could add a nice markup.

[Our_Benefactors]

Expensive (even for the wealthy, a lot of the time), not guaranteed to work, inviting more ire if it doesn’t work.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Doesn't help you now, but often data recovery companies such as DriveSavers only charge a fee if they are successful.

[ghaff]

Yeah. Not photos at the time but I’ve lost inadequately backed up hard drives at a time when online backups and external drives weren’t really a thing. Annoying but not something I was going to spend thousands of dollars to try to get recovered.

[jacamera]

Same, personally. But I also did on-site tech support in the same era and would always give customers the option if they had a drive I couldn't recover. Honestly seems negligent to me not to. On several occasions they opted to spend the ~$1,000 to recover their family photos, business documents, or other important files and were always extremely happy when it worked. These were not exceptionally wealthy people either.