Hi,
What should I do.
I was using my Raspberry Pi this morning, then left it switched on to get out to the garden.
When I returned, the screen was dead.
My Raspberry Pi was showing just the red light.
I pulled out the plug and started up again. This is what I now have.
Actually, I've had this before about two weeks ago. Then I bought a new SD card.
Please don't tell me that I have to do that again as since then, I've added quite a few things to the card......music playlists, customisation etc. Can it be recovered?
Red and white screen
NOT a Rasp Pi user here. But I would certainly try unplugging/plugging the SD card several times, then test again. We experience huge quality differences between cheap SD cards and top brands. The same is true for USB sticks, SSDs, and hard disks also.
Flash memory is not designed for continuous write/rewrite cycles, like what happens in some partitions on any OS. With a single SD card, yes, you can lose everything if that card goes bad.
Trying the SD in another machine may reveal whether it is the card or something about the Pi. Unless there is a plug dirty contact, and since you're not booting, I would guess the card is hosed, and you lost everything. But you can recover from your backup, right? 
I suspect you have just experienced the pain of what each person here has seen, some of us multiple times, because we think we can get away with it "just this once".
(And I think I'll update all our client network backups today, rather than putting it off as I have for the last two months.)
There are plenty of articles around on getting the best use of a Pi. You can get everything except the initial boot off of using the SD, and onto an SSD or DRAM or something more reliable. Even on SSDs, I put all filesystems with caches and anything else of a temporary nature onto DRAM using tmpfs. It is a lot of "under the hood" work, but that's the point of a Pi, isn't it?
Ubuntu puts a number of things by default onto DRAM tmpfs. But you can add at least the following: /tmp, /home//.cache, Browser cache (location varies), email client cache (location varies).
Or, if you want to keep it simple, you could 1) use the best SD cards, and larger capacity than you need (the spare space is used to swap out cells as they go bad), and 2) keep one or two current backups. It just takes moments, and can be set as a cron job to run automatically. The backup on a boot device would need to be an exact image. You should be able to make one with the "dd" command. It is easier if the cards are identical size. Does the Pi have two SD card slots?
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I've never seen a screen like that with a Pi - it suggests a partial boot has occurred, and so possible card corruption. Since this is like a repeat of your earlier experience, it may also be a Pi problem.
A backup from which you could re-load an image would be a good idea, but I don't know what resources you have (like other computers, usb adapters, sd-card readers...) so I can't advise further.
I have to say that my RPi4 systems have given no such problems, and are left running usually.
Hi, Yesterday I tried a fresh install on a Sandisk 64Gb SSD card. So far, everything is running perfectly.
HOWEVER, yesterday, when I was changing SD cards, I had the (faulty?) second SD card at my side. I picked it up, intending to drop it into my SD card container, but in a moment of stupidity, I dropped it into a fresh cup of coffee instead.
Artificial Intelligence will never beat natural stupidity.
Phil
A subconscious urge perhaps
Derek
I have a Scandisk 16 gig USB drive I keep on me most of the time in the watch pocket of my jeans. My wife has washed it and dried it twice because she never checks pockets when doing laundry, and the thing still works just fine. Not that I am recommending that, but it amazes me it still works.