Hey Xarishro, sorry to hear about the disk troubles. It’s part of what I do for work so (if you and Sarah think there is anything more that could be attempted to recover data) drop me a message and I’d be glad to take a look at no cost. :)
I second that, Xarishro. I've done data recovery, and you should always ask around before giving up. In some cases, it's surprisingly easy for someone who knows how.
I also strongly urge all creatives to have an off-site cloud backup, or at least a USB flash drive backup. The best online services cost money and are bulletproof, but there are free services (Onedrive, Dropbox) that will give you some space for valuable assets.
Thanks! Sarah's said she's going to try plugging her hard drive back in again tonight and see if she can get anything done. Here's hoping!
I definitely agree with making backups. I'm always paranoid about losing stuff so I back stuff up to an external hard drive every few days to a week. On top of that I've also got stuff saved to a usb flash drive and another laptop too.
Sarah seems to have had a cloud storage of some sort set up but she learned it was only keeping the most recent file. Which means technically she's still got the files for Blake's sprites, but that's it ^^'