Apologies for not posting much lately. Life has been hectic, and on top of everything else, I’ve had a pretty devastating data-loss disaster involving years of my music. It started when my 10TB music drive failed. In the same week, the 16TB drive containing my backup of that drive also failed. Combined with another 8TB drive I lost a couple of months earlier, I’ve now lost roughly 36TB of storage containing years of recordings, unfinished tracks, experiments and musical ideas. I do have MP3 versions of some finished pieces elsewhere, but much of the original material existed only on these drives. For more than three weeks, I spent nights and weekends trying to recover everything myself using AI-assisted troubleshooting and professional recovery software. I eventually managed to locate thousands of files, although the original DAW project files and folder structure appeared to be gone. What remained were mostly WAV and AIFF audio files. I don't even remember what else was on the drives (software/photos etc.) That at least gave me some hope. I recovered as much as possible onto another 8TB drive, only to discover that the recovered audio was corrupted — essentially raw files and white noise rather than usable music. So now I’m left with one final option: professional data recovery. I’ve been quoted or am expecting somewhere in the range of $500–$2,000 for the recovery attempt, and I would probably need to buy a 20TB drive to hold whatever they can recover. Altogether, I could be looking at close to $3,000. The difficult part is putting a dollar value on years of creative work. Financially, my music has earned me about $6.50 so far. Creatively, though, those drives contain years of ideas, recordings and pieces that may never be recreated. After weeks of trying to solve this myself, I’m mentally exhausted and genuinely torn about what to do next. So I’d really appreciate your thoughts: Would you spend the money — even borrow it — for one last attempt at professional recovery? Or accept that sometimes life really does suck, let the lost work go, and start making new music? I honestly don’t know which way I’m going yet.
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