Thanks for the suggestions all,
Infuriatingly a year of contracting away and staying at Airbnbs pretty much killed my backup practice.
Most stuff is backed up in multiple places, it's just a pain to recollect it all, I think I lost a few days work on personal projects and some photos so it's annoying rather than a disaster.
I'd pull out the ssd myself if I could comfortably get inside the laptop but there's no docs on how to reach the drives and I'd rather not damage anything.
Just finished creating a bootable USB stick with ubuntu 20 so will see if it will run that. I might try and see if I can dismantle it again if it boots and just throw a new ssd in, then see what I can recover from the old one.
To be honest I'm narked that a new ssd didn't even make it 2 years.
Kind regards,
Aaron.
