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.
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.