| Data Recovery - Ideas
Selecting a reputable data recovery company:
Experience is the key. Many of these companies have just started up recently. How long has the company been in business doing data recovery specifically? Do they have a list of referees?
Many so called data recovery businesses send their work to half a dozen or so major providers in the industry and only act as middlemen. Do they do all of the recoveries in-house or do they sub them out?
Many people ask what the success rate is. This usual answer will be 90%. This is a sales tactic! Drives have been getting worse and worse in quality recently and when they fail, they often fail in a big way.
If they seem evasive or vague and tell you just to "send it in", stay away.
Cost:
I recently had a problem with an external firewire drive. I thought the drive itself was b0rked. Turned out it was enclosure. Last time I buy a little-known brand fanless enclosure from eBay! Fortunately, the drive itself was still working.
In my initial panic, I looked up prices for data recovery in the UK. If you've a 4GB drive of irreplacable data, it's reasonable. However, the price is pegged to the number of gigabytes. Mine was 300. The costs were heading into the £800+ region, if I remember correctly. The data wasn't that important(!). There are many factors influencing cost of retrieval:
1. Drive capacity
2. The operating system and
3. The nature of the problem.
The bigger the drive, the more it costs. The cost will also be proportionate with the problem.
Many companies charge an evaluation fee. This fee can vary wildly for standard service or an emergency or a priority.
Some companies claim 'No data, no charge', but if they are able to recover your data, and you decide their quote is too high, they charge you a fee anyway!
Other companies charge no fee at all to examine the drive except for return shipping. It should take about fifteen minutes to determine what the problem is. In the case of severe corruption, the evaluation time can be much greater. It all depends on whether the engineer working on it is knowledgeable and experienced.
Prepare a drive for shipping:
First place the drive in an anti-static bag. Use a hard drive shipping box, as these are made specifically for this. They usually have pre-cut foam inside that cradles the drive tightly. Only use a box that surrounds the drive with _at least_ 3 inches of cushioning material. Make certain that there is no movement of the drive in the box.
If you have more than one drive, be sure to separate them by at least an inch of bubble wrap or there may be damage during shipping.
More information on data recovery.
The three most common problems seen today are: 1. The drive makes a repetitive clicking sound when power is turned on.
2. The drive is completely dead, not spinning at all.
3. The computer bios sees the drive, but can't boot it.
If your drive is making a clicking sound, this usually means that the heads are bad. You can expect an expensive data recovery because of what's needed to retrieve it. If the media has been scored, there may be nothing that can be done about it because so much of the recording material has been scraped off.
Unfortunately, manufacturers don't put a fuse on the drives' electronics anymore. You might just get another drive of the same model and swap the boards yourself, but for each model made by a manufacturer, there can be different revisions of the electronics.
If the drive is seen by the BIOS of the computer, and you can't access it by booting from a floppy disk (in the case of a drive running Windows) this means that the areas that define the partitions of the drive or the boot parameters have been corrupted.
This type of situation can sometimes be easily fixed, depending on how badly the data structure has been messed around.
Never run disk scanning utilities on a suspect drive. Leave it be. You may overwrite or change data, making recovery harder.
A data recovery company makes copy of your data onto another drive. The engineer can then work on the copy, and not the original. |
