On an SSD, time works against you far faster than on a hard drive. A few minutes can be enough to make recovery impossible.
That is the essential difference, and almost nobody knows it. On a mechanical hard drive, a deleted file stays recoverable for weeks. On an SSD, a function called TRIM genuinely erases the freed blocks, often within a few minutes of the deletion. The window sometimes counts in minutes, not days.
If files have disappeared from an SSD and they matter, switch the machine off immediately. Not sleep, not “let me finish what I am doing”: a full shutdown. Every second the system runs, it carries on writing in the background and freeing blocks.
Above all, do not install recovery software on the SSD concerned: the installation itself writes to it, and that is precisely what has to be avoided. The work is done from another machine, with the SSD connected for reading.
This is the most common confusion, and an expensive one. A computer that will not start usually has a system problem, not a disk problem: the files are intact and can be recovered by connecting the SSD to another machine. What actually destroys data in these cases is the reinstall launched in the hope of “fixing” it. Never start one before putting your documents somewhere safe.
There are no moving parts. An SSD does not click, does not grind, gives no warning. Where a mechanical hard drive shows signs for weeks - slowness, freezes, noises - an SSD works perfectly right up to the moment it does not work at all. That is why backup matters even more on this kind of drive.
The data is spread out by the internal controller according to its own logic, and often encrypted in hardware. That makes recovery more complex than simply reading sector by sector: if the controller is dead, the memory chips alone are not enough.
TRIM erases for good. It is what keeps performance up over time, but it is also what closes the recovery window.
We start with a diagnosis establishing what is genuinely recoverable, and in what proportion. It is an honest answer, given before you commit: on an SSD the answer is sometimes “very little”, and it is better to know that straight away.
The drive is then connected read-only to a dedicated machine, never mounted for writing. We work from an image of the drive where possible, so as not to strain an already fragile component further.
Recovered files are saved to a third drive, never the original. We hand them back organized as far as possible - folder structure and file names are sometimes lost, and piecing that back together is part of the work.
This has to be said plainly, because the opposite gets sold a lot. If the blocks have been erased by TRIM, no technique will bring them back: it is not a question of resources, the information no longer exists. If the SSD's controller is destroyed and hardware encryption is active, recovery becomes extremely unlikely. And files encrypted by ransomware are not a data recovery matter but something else entirely - see ransomware protection.
Nobody can seriously guarantee a result before examining the drive. Those who do are selling you a hope, not a service.
Recovery from mechanical drives, USB sticks and memory cards follows a different and often more favorable logic: see our data recovery page, along with our articles on an unreadable USB stick and an external disk not recognized.
Only one thing genuinely protects you: a copy elsewhere. On an SSD, the absence of warning signs makes backup all the more essential. See automatic backup and our article on how to back up your data.
Far less than on a hard drive: the TRIM function genuinely erases the freed blocks, often within a few minutes. Switching the machine off straight away is the only thing that improves your chances.
No, and nobody can seriously guarantee it before examining the drive. The diagnosis does tell you what is recoverable and in what proportion, before you commit to anything.
Often yes, more so than a mechanical drive: with no moving parts, a knock rarely damages the memory chips. It is the circuit board or the controller that suffer.
On a drive whose data really matters, it is risky: installing the software and writing the recovered files can overwrite what you are looking for. If the loss is significant, do not attempt anything.
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