Getting back files that were on a different computer

I have a MacBook and it just recently stopped working due to water damage. All of my sketchup files were saved to that computer drive (nothing was saved to the iCloud. It is empty when I check it) is there ANY way of me recovering those files from my sketchup account?

If they were only saved to the internal drive on your computer then they do not exist elsewhere. If you’d been creating backups by saving to your Trimble Connect account, then you could access the files from there. You would have needed to be intentionally saving them to Trimble Connect for them to be there, though. They don’t just automatically get saved to Trimble Connect.

If the drive is truly empty you’re out of luck. You might look around for a service that does disk recovery. They might be able to retrieve stuff off of it. I had a catastrophic hard drive failure about 15 years ago. A service was able to get all of my SketchUp files off it but I lost a bunch of other stuff. Might be worth a try in your case.

Just a suggestion : I bough a 1TB external hard drive about 8 years ago for about 70 Can $ and backed up all of the internal hard drive of my 2011 Macbook Pro to it. It saved my life when that Macbook Pro stopped working in 2017.

I bough a brand new 2017 Macbook Pro and was able to rebuild the content of the older Mac without any problem.

Last year I bought a SSD 1TB external drive to have a second back-up. The SSD is much faster than the older mechanical drive. This SSD was on sale in the USA for 50 US$.

I consider that this is not a great price to pay to keep my peace of mind.

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If your drive is dead then you are out of luck but if you likely won’t be able to tell without asking an expert in data recovery and that can be expensive and/or time consuming. If you really need your files you can try googling to find someone that offers such a service. Just keep in mind that shipping an item like a laptop can be expensive and takes a while so if you are under a time constraint, it may be prudent to start remaking the file while you wait for your chosen data recovery expert to get back to you.

Generally though, I try and back up my important SketchUp files to at least 2 physical locations and one cloud service like Trimble Connect or a Google Drive. I also try and keep multiple versions backed up in case one corrupts somehow.

Just DON’T save files directly to an external drive from SketchUp. Save to your desktop or laptop hard drive and then move or copy the file to the external drive. Direct saving can, in rare cases cause corruption.

Thankyou so much for this information