A burst pipe above the home office, a basement that meets the Aire in a wet Yorkshire winter, a house fire that spared the safe and cooked everything around it — disaster media has one comfort: platters and flash chips are far tougher than the electronics around them. The recovery rules, though, are counter-intuitive. Read before you dry anything.
$ ldr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: LaCie Rugged (USB-C) → Status: WATER DAMAGE — dropped in loch → Client: confidential · Scarborough $ ldr engineer-working → Board: cleaned, not powered dry → Heads: donor set fitted → Imaging: 98% · corrosion mapped $ ldr verify → ✓ field_footage — recovered → ✓ project_files — back → ✓ never dried it — right call
The instinct — radiator, airing cupboard, rice — is exactly wrong. Drying deposits every mineral and contaminant the water carried as residue on connectors and, if water breached the drive, on platter surfaces, where dried crud does more harm than moisture did. Flood water especially is not clean water. The protocol: never power it on (electricity plus damp electronics finishes what water started), seal the device in a plastic bag — damp is fine, that’s the point — and get it to the bench, where controlled cleaning strips contaminants properly before any recovery begins. Wet-recovered drives have excellent outcomes; dried-and-tried drives make the sad half of the statistics.
Fire attacks storage in three ways. Direct heat — though plastics deform long before platters demagnetise, so a melted case very often shrouds perfectly recoverable metal. Then soot (conductive, invasive, shorting boards that would otherwise live), and the aftermath — extinguisher residue and hose water finishing the job. Same protocol as flood: no power, no cleaning attempts, bag it, bring it, however bad it looks — the diagnostic costs nothing even on a device that looks like charcoal, and the honest verdict sometimes surprises in the right direction. For businesses: this pairs with the emergency track when the damaged media is the operational one.
Not necessarily — but stop there, and whatever you do, don’t power it on to check. Drying leaves residue behind; power finds it. Bag the drive as-is and send it; controlled cleaning reverses more sins than you'd expect. The diagnostic verdict stays free either way.
Yes. Outcomes are documented as standard, and we can give you written confirmation of the device’s condition, what was recoverable and what was not, in a form insurers accept. Mention the claim at intake and paperwork shapes itself accordingly.
It costs nothing, so yes — and a melted exterior regularly hides survivable storage. Platters tolerate heat that destroys plastic, and soldered chips outlive their boards. We've returned data from devices that arrived in freezer bags of parts. Worst case, you get a definitive, documented no.