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Friendly reminder to never forcebly shutdown your PC
(lemmy.world)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That’s not how PCs work. Once you’ve downloaded the data, it’s on your hard drive, not the RAM. This sounds very much like you’ve experienced hard drive failure.
Mem cache is definitely still a thing. Non-volatile storage has gotten faster in recent years but it’s still not as fast as RAM. Depending how his system is configured, data loss is definitely possible.
That being said, unless it was one big file and he lost critical data that made the file readable (say an MBR on a disk image) there’s no way he should have lost 44GB.