Are you asking for ideas on how to recover the files from the hard drive or ideas for what people are doing to store their files so you can avoid future losses?
Unfortunately I have no ideas on the first one, if you paid a recovery service and still ended up with nada I don't even know where to begin but I do offer my condolences, that sucks!
However I think you're asking about ways to avoid it in the future. I put all my photos on Shutterfly, Google Photos, and Amazon Photos (depends on the photos) although I do have copies synch'd to my local machine as well. It's free to store the photos in libraries online and I get to take advantage of the ridiculously redundant infrastructure inherent in cloud-based storage rather than build my own. There are plenty of options available for free or on the cheap that are completely reliable, WAY more so than just storing them locally without investing in one of these hardware solutions others' have mentioned which cost extra $$ and require intervention.
Furthermore, the data is available automatically on every device I want it to be available on and is sharable to friends and family however I want it to be shared.
Cloud is simply the way to go IMHO, if my machine were to implode right before my very eyes this second it would suck but I'll have lost nothing other than the time and $ to rebuild my machine. All my data is stored elsewhere without even thinking about it.
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