Data Recovery
 

Does anyone have any experience using a data recovery service. I have a laptop hard drive that is toast and also an external 200gig drive that will not work either.

Laptop was looked at by a shop and it needs a data recovery lab.

Any reccomendations are appreciated.

We had a hard disk crash on one of our audio editing devices. had $2000 worth of client data on it. We shopped around and there are a few common themes I encountered when dealing with data recovery companies:
-it's extremely expense
-they charge a base rate that is not refundable, regardless of if they recover the data or not
-quoted costs have a huge range ($400-3000 was a quote from one company) and are storage capacity based

We had to evaluate the cost of recovery and had to eat the $2000 to the client. Just wasn't worth the gamble to pay out a couple grand to a data recovery company, it potentially not work, then have to pay out another $2000 as a refund. This was all 3 or 4 years ago... costs have probably come down.

My suggestion is to call half a dozen companies to get quotes. Don't waste your time bringing the drives to Geek Squad - waste of time and money.

If you want to send them to me I can take them as far as they will go short of a high end data recovery place.

John

Bobby has the laptop and tried everything at work...nasty noises...if I understood correctly its at least an armature broken plus more...he said only option for that drive is high end clean room stuff

The maxtor 200 gig external drive is going to Bobby Thursday as there is no drive noise at all...maybe just maybe the drive is not getting power...but the indicator light does come on...yuk...I'll call you in a few days when I know more...coming to Warwick on Friday morning for an ASMFC Sea Herring Meeting

x2

throw it in the freezer for a few hours. don't know why but sometimes that works long enough to get the data off. I'm 2/4 doing that.

if it's mechanical like you said then there is not much you can do. Is the sound you hear sound like the arm is bouncing back and forth over the platter kinda rhythmic?

I'll try to keep this short- my wife is a photog. She had an external hard drive go ka-put a couple years ago after a power surge. The manufacturer (western digital i think??) recomended a data recovery place on the left coast so she calls them. They tell her it will be at least 300-700 buc's but might be more and that she needs to send it out to them to evaluate it. Once they get it the quote turns into 4,500 buc's- she was in tears. I told her to do what she had to do because even the pictures she's taken of our kids over a bunch of years were on it- she decided she couldn't bring her self to spend the money. She asked them to send it back (keeping in mind they could have "finished it #^&#^&#^&#^& before doing so to make sure no one else could get the data back- it really felt like they had it hostage at that point) a couple days later they call back and say they could do it for 3,000 buc's- wtf? She still wont budge but now she's pissed so a couple more weeks go by. She asks them again to send it back- this time they say they can do it for 2'200 buc's. At that point she and i were both pretty hot but i made her tell them to go ahead and do it just to put an end to it. They did recover 100%. It really was a huge pile of crap the way they went about it- it was extortion imo. They try to guage the value of the info and once they have it in house they hold you over the fire for whatever they can squeeze out of you. In our case holding out by her willingness to loose the photo's saved us a bunch of money. good luck!