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?

cordlesslamp , (edited )

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.

Bishma OP ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Thanks!

And yeah, I'm prepared for 4 figures on this one. I mean, as prepared as I'm going to be.

Drunemeton ,
@Drunemeton@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Bishma OP ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Thank you for the tip. I will make sure they're on my list.

Exusia ,
@Exusia@lemmy.world avatar

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

bdonvr ,

Definitely don't. They might be able to run some tools that try to pull files from corrupt file systems but they definitely don't have the specialty skills and knowledge on how to recover physically damaged hard disks.

DudeDudenson ,

What do you mean you need to send my car to a specialized shop to have the engine replaced? My mechanic has been fixing the oil leak for years for 50 bucks!!

RyeMan ,

They definitely charge more than $100, data recovery is one of the most expensive services at Best Buy. Level 1 data recovery, depending on the staff there they may try and perform that in house but level 2 always needs to be shipped out to a clean room and will easily push $1,000+. Also, the reality of data recovery is unless the data being recovered is highly important, it's almost never worth it. During file recovery, file structure and naming gets destroyed so the results are hundreds of folders with nonsense names filled with hundreds of files with nonsense names and sometimes even missing an extension type, it's a total mess with no guarantee that the data you need was actually recovered.

Exusia ,
@Exusia@lemmy.world avatar

So, what service have they been doing for me (genuine)? It has been some time (since now I have a backup of important stuff to not need recovery), but I took a laptop in for cooked hard drive and got a thumb drive back with what looked like they were able to copy everything from the top level folder. Opening the thumb drive brought me to what most people see at the top level - a bunch of folders named My Documents, My Pictures, My Computer, etc
Obviously stuff was missing from the crash, but they got a bunch of stuff from a fried laptop.

EddoWagt ,

The drive was probably not physically damaged, so they could still recover some data from software

RyeMan ,

Yeah if there is no physical damage then it's a level 1 recovery which tends to have better results. A "cooked" drive doesn't explain anything about the failure type but I have worked in computer repair for a number of years and it was very common for people to believe their HDD was fried when in fact it was not, sometimes misbehaving software can behave very similarly to a failing HDD. In those cases it's very simple to do a full data backup off the drive with folder structure still intact, coming from someone who's been behind the counter at BestBuy, they probably just did a regular data backup (while charging you for a recovery) if your data was still perfectly intact. They love to sell their data recovery service because it's expensive as hell and techs are actually told not to spend time on renaming and restructuring the data so the techs literally just run some freeware, walk away from your PC and then just hand you a USB (that you also pay for separately) with whatever results got spat out when it's done. Don't let them fool you though, Level 1 recovery pretty much anyone can do with some freeware (plenty of good options out there) and spare time. If the drive failed from too many bad sectors and you caught it early then yeah level 1 recovery is still possible but you may still experience some file structure corruption depending on how early you caught it. It becomes a game of luck depending on where the bad sectors exist and how many there are.

If your drive is experiencing mechanical failure, and it's bad enough, you can hear it very clearly if you put your ear near the drive while it's spinning. If you hear a grinding and/or clicking noise that's usually a pretty solid indicator the the drive is experiencing mechanical failure and a level 2 recovery will be necessary which usually requires a clean room and some very specialized knowledge and tools.

Also, I should mention, this only applies to mechanical hard disk drives, solid state memory is a completely different beast and data recovery is oftentimes impossible on these types of drives.

Scipitie ,

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.

Bishma OP ,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

Scipitie ,

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

Good luck!

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