Sorry about your misfortunes.
I live dreading the day something like that could happen to my hard drive. Anyway, the idea you had was not stupid at all, but perhaps, and it's my humble advice, it's time for wrapping some working version of this? Once it's out and uploaded you will no longer need to fear data loss and you can work on improvements for the next versions.
Personally, I don't think that the Player needs to read the description off the broken datapad in order to make it realistic that the message is delivered in full. The whole thing is completely unrealistic from the very beginning. The Player finds many datapads in the game and there is only a few lines in them. We can assume that there are means available that allow for a partial recovery of the content just the same way as we can assume that the game reports the very small part of content that is of interest for each retrived datapad.
Cheers!