Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
This is what I meant. Not that you expect your laptop to fail (or be stolen), but any important work should exist in a recoverable way. OP claims to have lost a lot of data when this happened to them. That should approximately never happen, at least not more than the day's worth when you were off network.
As a consumer this is perhaps practical advice.
> Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But if you were a customer, would you be okay with a business losing your vital data because they wanted everything on a single machine? It doesn't matter if it's a laptop, it may be a server on the cloud.
Just plugging them in often isn't enough to make them notice and refresh all data - the SSD doesn't have a clock in so doesn't know it's been unplugged for a long time.
The real answer is "for every month an SSD is powered down, leave it powered up for a day"
Wrong. Stop repeating nonsense.
The original poster stated, "They start heavily corrupting data if left unpowered for around a year or two though, in case this gives anyone false confidence in a use case they aren't designed for." A person asked if all SSDs do that and you said, "Yes, all SSD's suffer this effect." This statement is wrong.
The AnandTech article even mentions the falsehoods and states it wants to clear up the confusion. A drive must meet certain conditions before data loss begins. Simply putting a backup or thumb drive in a safe for several years isn't going to cause data loss and the AnandTech article comes to this conclusion.
Here is another article from PCWorld with commentary from the authors of the 2015 JEDEC presentation that started this hysteria.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wo...