Proactive Drive Health & Instant Partition Recovery Service

Opportunity: The user's external drive took a physical hit and now shows up in the system but is unreadable in the file explorer. This points to a corrupted partition table or file system, which can make all the data on the drive suddenly inaccessible. While the immediate issue is data recovery, there's a real opportunity here to prevent this type of data loss. A SaaS solution could focus on proactively preserving drive structure, rather than just recovering files after the fact.

Product Form: A lightweight background agent for Windows and macOS, called "Drive Guard" or "Partition Sentinel."

• Core Function: Instead of backing up user files, the service automatically and periodically backs up the drive’s structural metadata (like the Partition Table and MFT) to the cloud. This data is tiny (just kilobytes), making backups quick and cost-effective.
• Monitoring: The agent actively monitors the health (S.M.A.R.T. status) of all connected drives and alerts the user to any predictive failure warnings.
• One-Click Restore: If a drive suffers from logical corruption and becomes unreadable (as in the Reddit post), the user can use the SaaS dashboard to initiate a "structure restore." The agent writes the last known good partition/file system metadata back to the drive. If the hardware is still intact, this could restore full access to all files within seconds, bypassing the need for slow, deep-scan recovery software.

Expected Revenue: The business model is a subscription service targeting prosumers, creators, and small businesses who rely on external drives.

• Pricing:
  • Free Tier: Monitor 1 drive, 1-day backup history.
  • Personal Tier: $5/month for up to 5 drives with unlimited backup history.
  • Pro Tier: $10/month for unlimited drives and priority support.
• Revenue Projection: With a modest initial user base of 2,000 paying customers at an average of $5/month, the MRR would be $10,000, leading to an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $120,000. Given the low operational costs (cloud storage for metadata is negligible), the model is highly scalable and profitable.