Tech Any experience with data recovery services?

seaotta

seaotta

Member
Oct 21, 2008
751
2
#1
So my external hard drive crashed tonight....it took all my music, but I can get that back, all my photos i had pulled from the web for inspiration, and every picture I have taken since 2006 to present. I'm most concerned about the photos, I had made a huge effort to be taking photos these past few years, and you'd think being a graphic design major w/a web design emphasis I would have backed it all up again on to a 2nd device.

Well I didn't. So I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with data recovery, it is expensive but I'd pay to get all those files I had on there back. Any advice/suggestions are welcome.

:sad:
 
#2
Unfortunately it depends on whether or not they need to take the drive to a "clean room". Sometimes in the store they can do some type of pull so I think the price is going to depend on what actually went wrong with the drive. Once they have to take the drive apart then you are talking $$$$. DH drive crashed and it was $1700 for the recovery. Tough pill to swallow. I now use Mozy unlimited backup in conjunction with an external drive that gets backed up to Mozy as well. Worth the $5.00 a month for peace of mind.
 
#3
We used http://www.datarecovery.com/ and paid like $900 dollars and got EVERYTHING back. And it was a clean room recovery that they had to get into the drive with. If you have a Western Digital drive tell them you found them on Western Digital because it gets you a discount.. But all in all it was a pretty good experience and I cried when I got the data back because I was so happy. In my instance I had all my business files backed up but I didn't have my personal data backed up, which wasn't too smart since I know how important it is. Hard lesson learned!
 
#5
One last thing you can try is take the hard drive, put it in a zip lock bag and stick it in the freezer for 24 hours. Take it out, let it thaw for two hours and plug it in and see if it works. It's not a permanent fix, but it may give you time to get some data off.

If not, then data recovery services start at around $800. If it's still under warranty, the drive manufacturer will sometimes have a recommended place you can use. Oftentimes won't get a discount, but at least it's a place they trust.
 
#6
The freezer trick only works in certain circumstances, and it CAN damage your drive further if it is damaged in a particular way. I considered it but I was too nervous because the data was too important to risk anything happening.
 
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