Another colleague reports that her hard drive died this week; and she has not been backing up regularly. Recovering data from a dead or dying hard drive is not easy, and therefore expensive.
Not long ago, another client paid a data recovery company about $3000 to retrieve the contents of her hard drive. She arranged this service through her local computer store, based on their advise. The company recovered most of her files, but delivered the results as a somewhat disjointed bunch of files. My client, not knowing how to parse through these files and restore them where they belong on her new hard drive, hired me to sort that out, and also setup a backup system to prevent this need from recurring.
Data recovery from an utterly dead drive is so painfully expensive, because the process is painstaking and mechanical, often starting with dismantling your damaged hard drive in a costly “cleanroom”. If you’re running a business, time is money, and your data is valuable. If you need your lost data right away, you probably need to bite the bullet, cough up a few $1000 bucks, and have your drive sent to a data recovery company, pronto.
Sometimes it’s possible to recover your data for a fraction of that cost, if you can wait a little longer to get it back. I’ve successfully recovered the full contents of many dying and malfunctioning hard drives, using simpler data recovery tools. The potential results depend on the severity and type of damage your particular drive has sustained. If it works, you’ll only be out a few hundred bucks (not thousands) for my time. If these methods can’t recover you drive, you’ll be out $150 for the time it takes me to determine the problem is too severe for this simpler fix, and the time it took to try.
If I can’t fix or recover your drive on the cheap, I can personally arrange the services of a high end data recovery vendor. These companies are accustomed to dealing with IT and computer store staff. I can talk to them in GeekSpeak, and to you in plain English. If you like, I can also setup your new and/or backup hard drive, using the data that is recovered.
Of course, you can avoid all these costs by backing up your data today, and on a regular basis hereafter, taking my free advice about how to backup your data while you sleep and work. Remember, every machine with moving parts will eventually break. The platters in your hard drive are revolving 4,000 to 10,000 times per second, with tolerances so tight that a grain of dust could scrape data off those platters. Be ready, with a full backup, for the day your drive dies.
And you can get more free advice in the future, by reading Mykl.biz or following my posts via Facebook, Twitter or RSS.
