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Has anyone used a hard drive data recovery service, and if so do you have any tips? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

All excellent advice, thank you very much! I like the idea of actually calling the companies, my introvert brain hadn't come up with that.

I'm on the west coast of the US, BTW.

I could be wrong about the price being dependent on volume of data recovered, that's was the impression I got from a lot of the company's marketing sites.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

My pricing experience is from Europe so that could be a different approach to their markets.

Good luck!