No. I've already taken it in to technicians. 

My only remaining option is to send it in to an expert's lab in California, but I can't afford the procedure and there's no guarantee that it will be successful. Maybe I should start a gofundme...(kidding).

You lost it all? No printouts? No pictures saved elsewhere? Most of my important stuff is located in a few locations.

Did you send anything out through emails or Google Drive? I lost my hard drive once, but I found all my essays because I had sent them through email. So I just went through everything and downloaded all the attachments.

you can usually recover data from a harddrive, even if it's really fubared.  does the harddrive have a clicking sound?  or how did it fail/how bad?  Just a corrupt MBR?

i think i used photorec last time i tried to get data off a dead drive, but it's been a long time.

Maybe it's a sign not to apply to grad school.  That hard drive might have saved you 100K.  

Are you taking a break between undergrsd and grad school? I had a 5 year break between undergrad and grad school. My grad school application portfolio had one project, considering of a single spread, from my undergrad. Everything else was professional work and competitions.

You have a few years to work on stuff to put in your portfolio, get on it :)

Very happy with iCloud - can access files anywhere and do use thunderbolt for back up - files/photos from phone go to iCloud so frees up storage -

Cloud storage is so cheap now no excuses - 

Some Uni's may keep work electronically for a number of years for validation visits so you might go check there -

?

No, you absolutely should not mention that in your application.  It will read as an excuse, a lack of confidence in what you do have in your portfolio, and as an indicator of a lack of sound judgement (i.e. a person who intends to have a career that revolves around files of visual work should by this point in their education have the forethought to back up at least some examples of their work.)

I can't imagine how you would not have various sketches and printed examples from which you could recreate a decent portfolio.

Was any of your work ever published in your school's catalogs? Or was any of it saved by the school as examples for their periodic accreditation purposes?  Did you ever have to turn anything in electronically to any of your profs?  Did any of them save examples of your work for their own teaching portfolios? Any of those would be routes to try to get some examples back.

Actually this accident may be helpful to you in creating your portfolio.  Many applicants have terrible problems in editing down their massive collection of undergrad output into a just a few good projects, represented by a few good images each.  If you can only manage to salvage a few scraps, that job will effectively be done and you can focus on making the most of what you do have.

save everything in 3 places at 2 different places min.  

no portfolio? then make a new one! join workshops or short courses, do internships, get a job---then the work you get to do there, put that in your portfolio. it's one thing to have a portfolio of work from school, but it's an added edge when you also have experience and work outside of school. i had a schoolmate one year ahead of me in architecture school who was the biggest slack off in school and her work was nothing short of mediocre, not to mention her grades. she got lucky she got into a really good design firm after finishing bachelors, so she got to handle really nice projects. we were classmates during review for the board exams and she would cut class to party but she passed and she's now licensed. then she applied for grad school and she got in IAAC, IE and even the AA! i believe she did her first masters in IAAC before moving to IE Madrid. just be resourceful and creative.

the architecture field does not suffer fools lightly, sooner or later, your shortcommings will do you in and you will be fired numerous times before you finally wake up to the grim truth that you just don't have it

If you fucked up this horribly, you probably shouldn't go to grad school.

It's not like there aren't 200 cloud services that you could have used to back up your work. It's not like a 2TB hard drive costs more than 100 bucks these days.

If you're not proactive enough to research this sort of basic yet 100% essential shit, you probably can't be trusted with designing a roof that will hang over someone's head.

Also, I'm just going to note that while back I said that KPF is run by inept children with fancy titles. Point proven.

create what you need to get a job, if you don't already have one.  and slowly base a new portfolio around sketches, self-directed work, and professional work.

In a few years no one will care about your undergrad.

My car was stolen with literally all my arch. work in it as I was applying to grad schools. (before everything was on computers)  I ended up not applying and working for a few years before going back.  Was prob a good thing in the end.

All that flame...my heart goes out to you OP.

I got my car smash n grabbed in SF, on Geary and Fillmore some crack head  got my lap top with all my school work on it - but - I had it all backed up - SFPD told me "son. I hope you learned your lesson" and walked back to his desk - preparation is key

in 2008 I lost 17 years of archives when a dude in the office pushed my ext hard drive to the floor when running. Now I have 3 backup locations, all physical drives, not clouds and shit. sync them once a month.