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Has anyone used a hard drive data recovery service, and if so do you have any tips?

We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.

I'm just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.

One specific question I have pertains to what's recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We're only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there's tons of OS and other files we don't want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?

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14 comments
  • Sorry for that hazzle! My story is quite different but exactly the same: my father in law "didn't get around" to do backups and lost his HDD full of important photos and documents.

    That said: I'm quite sure that there are huge regional differences. Without knowing your country just keep that in kind.

    I phoned around several companies. I had a simple first benchmark: either directly speak with a tech savvy person (big plus) or being forwarded to one.

    That eliminated already half of them who had more business than tech.

    The important thing to look out for in hindsight is their transport standards, i.e. how does the broken disk get to them and how does the rescued data get back?

    Be careful of companies who have the potential to take the disk hostage ("we give a quote after first analysis").

    Paying per file rescued sounds weird to me because that's not how the rescue process usually works from what I understand.

    The company I went with was very upfront about the best and worst case what to expect, etc. They were very transparent about the risks and their process as well.

    Nearly all of the critical data was rescued and delivered on an encrypted disk. The key was handed out after final payment - a process I quite liked.

    In short: talk to the people and find a way to figure out whom you trust most.

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  • My advice is you only have ONE CHANCE to recover the data, so choose wisely.

    DO NOT go for the "cheaper" service, it will NOT worth it.

    Once the drive is opened for service, if not done properly can and will make the drive completely ruined.

    I learned that the hard way by choosing the "cheaper quotes".

    Small note: the cost to recover a 1TB drive could go for thousands of dollars and up, so be prepare for that. Data recovery is NOT cheap.

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  • Drivesavers!

    They’re not cheap, but they can damn near recover anything.

    Example: We had a sales rep. in Saudi Arabia for a month. On the way there he dropped his laptop bag. Wouldn’t startup and made a rattling sound when shook.

    For over a month he had a detached read/write head dancing across the drive platters. (He kept his replacement laptop and the damaged one together in his bag…)

    Drivesavers managed to recover every file but one. Also the first time they failed to recover the entire drive for us, and we sent them <5/year. When we got the drive back it was shocking how much damage that head did to those platters, and amazing they only failed on one file!

    This was over 2 decades ago and cost us $2.3K. Not sure what they’re charging these days or if they can selectively recover files/folders as we always did the entire drive.

    But if you absolutely need that data they’ll get it!

    Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer in my last job.

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  • Idk Best buy and an IT place here offer disk recovery for about $100. Everything they can save from it, copied to a thumb, disk, or external hard drive. I didn't realize this was such a service. If you have them, try a best buy I guess. I've taken laptops and HDDs to the IT place just cuz they're local business but I know I've taken dead desktops to BBuy to get a disk salvaged

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