If your data's important to you, store it on a mechanical hard disk rather than an SSD.
That’s the advice of Phil Bridge, managing director of data recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack.
"My wife asked me if she should buy a laptop with spinning media or solid-state storage," he told us. "Honestly, I’d go with spinning media right now. Because I know that if something goes wrong, and we don’t have a backup, that’s going to be easier and cheaper to recover.
While recovering lost data from solid-state media is possible, the process can be time-consuming - and therefore expensive.
"With spinning media you’ve got pretty well established sets of standards," Bridge explained. "With solid-state, it’s almost as if every drive that comes in has a different structure and different technology. Many of them require bespoke development to get the data back – whereas if someone sends in a Western Digital or Seagate drive, we’ve seen those a thousand times before."
Kroll Ontrack mainly serves large organisations that can afford to pay for a specialist service, but Bridge emphasised that its services are open to consumers too.
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