Recently our Laptop died on very short notice, and we have a competition on Saturday. We are currently using an SATA to USB adapter to attempt to recover the code from the HDD, but have hit a few minor roadblocks that are being dealt with.
However for future reference:
Is there any way to essentially pull the code from the RIO itself using the NI Browser utility or are our current efforts sufficient?
You can scp the compiled binary off the robot for backup, but there isn’t a way to get your source code from the robot. The binary is located at /home/lvuser/FRCUserProgram(.jar)
If you use Java and you have no other way to get the code back, you could download the compiled binary off the roboRIO, and decompile it. This should be a last resort because there will likely be a lot of work to actually bring the decompiled code to a functioning state and all your comments will be lost.
In the future, you should definitely use some kind of backup system, such as Dropbox or git (there are lots of benefits to using git).