What would you do if you lost your game saves or progress?

This was something I started thinking about since in recent news, games and consoles of the previous generation are already running into problems.

Spoiler: Examples

For instance, the PlayStation 4 has a flaw where if the CMOS battery were to die out, it could render physical or digital games to be unplayable, even offline. And while it isn't exactly a problem now, since these internal batteries are designed to last a long time, gamers can run into the problem at some time in the future.

Meanwhile, European releases of 3DS physical game cartridges released around 2014 (which includes games such as Pokémon ORAS and Persona Q) have been reported to be failing to read properly when inserted into the handheld console.

The main point is, physical games (disks, cartridges, practically any medium) and consoles won't last forever. You can run into problems like data degradation (like bit rot, although modern-day ECCs such as Hamming and Reed-Solomon codes do have a things like parity checks to self-correct these sorts of issues to mitigate these problems to some extent), environmental factors (like oxidization/rusting and water damage), battery issues (like maybe your save file is tied with the battery), or just wear over time (number of write cycles).

What would you do, if you lost your save or progress, especially for a game you treasure the most?

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Obviously, it would depend on the specific situation, but probably the first thing I would do is search for solutions online which is the more general thing to do. But maybe even check with a repair shop, if it looks like a game or console can be revived; for instance, sometimes reflowing a game chip could fix reading issues or replacing a piece of hardware could fix an entire unit, and it's oftentimes better to visit a repair shop than having to solder things on your own (especially if you're inexperienced with repairing your own things). I'd probably be careful with which repair shop I choose though, because if it's a game company's customer support offering repair, they might just give you a replacement instead so then you lose everything. And finally, if the progress is forever lost, I think most people would just move on to playing the next games (the sequels or successors) and the next consoles anyway; I probably would as well.