Has anyone had any experience with a data recovery services? My Western Digital My World Book NAS drive crashed and it is beyond what I can recover myself. I tried removing the actual drive from the housing and plugging it into an external drive reader, but no luck. This drive has all of the digital pictures from the past 5 years on it, so recovery is worth spending some money. And yes, on order now is a nice Drobo RAID system so that this doesn’t happen again. Plus I’ll make sure the pictures at least are backed up to another location. Maybe online. So has anyone had any luck sending a drive off to a lab for recovery? How much did it cost? Did they recover all your data? Any info would be appriciated.
Thanks
What kind of external did you try? I’ve personally had a lot of luck using this BYTECC Home page
A great many drives I thought didn’t work because they stopped in the computer ended up firing right up at least enough to drag and drop to a new HD.
Years ago, I sent a drive to Ontrack after trying to recover what we could ourselves. We were able to pull about 40-50% of the image from the failing drive by repeatedly attempting to read each block; Ontrack recovered 99+% of the drive. It was expensive (~14K US$, as I recall,) but that paid for expedited service over the Independence Day weekend and so is unlikely to reflect what you’d have to pay. IMHO, they were quite professional, and did a good job.
Good luck with your drive. I’m off to start a pit thread about the sysadmin who ignored multiple drive failure warnings on a RAID array over nearly a year’s time.
I know it sounds nuts, but try this.
It all depends on what the problem is but I’ve had success with iRecover. I think it’s mainly useful if the hardware is okay but the file system structure is corrupted.
Spinrite might be worth a try. Apparently it can help even if the disk surface is damaged. It repeatedly reads blocks, takes averages of the data etc and tries to reconstruct.
Funny you should ask. The HD in my MacBook just died; nothing but a blinking question mark on startup. Apple in-store tech was flummoxed and suggested I call DriveSavers, Ontrack or Lazarus. The first two were ridiculously expensive ($500-$3k), but Lazarus quoted me between $150 and $1600, and only that much if the drive was physically damaged- fire, water, etc. The drive didn’t suffer any actual damage like that, just wouldn’t boot up one day. It has about 10 months of my life on it, un-backed-up, of course.
Lazarus was started by one of the 3 guys to founded DriveSavers, and he did it as a lower-cost alternative.
I just sent it off to them this morning. Will let you know how it goes.
Interesting…definitely a name to file under “Hope I never need this!”
FWIW, Drive Savers is our default go-to recovery service. Yes, they are freakishly expensive, but they do an excellent job - they can recover nearly anything that isn’t physically missing.
I’ve used both DriveSavers and Ontrack. The problem with DriveSavers is that they can’t tell you upfront what the cost will be, which makes it difficult if I’m trying to get a purchase order for the service. (The company didn’t want to issue a blank PO.) Ontrack had a different approach, where they would evaluate the drive for a fixed cost (of $100-200 as I remember), and provide a quote specifying exactly which files could be recovered and the exact cost (which turned out to be about $1,800).
Yes, data recovery services can work very well indeed.
Thanks corkboard that exactly what I’m hoping to find out. I’m looking at using Salvagedata. I talked to one of their reps that said that typically the cost is between $600 and $1200 for most personal type drive errors. But I’d be interested to hear what your price and data recovery process is like. If you could ping this back when you find out I’d appriciate it. Like your drive, mine just sort of stopped working one day, it didn’t get dropped, or anything like that, so I’m hoping it’s something easily recovered from.
Although I think I will try the freezer thing just on the off chance that it’ll work. So I’ll let you know if I have any sucess with that endevor.
Thanks for all the replies.
I’m going to bump this once in the hopes that corkboard has either gotten his data back and can tell me about that service, or at least can tell me what their estimate came back as.
Nothing further yet; FedEx confirmed that Lazarus received delivery on 10/10. I was hoping to hear from them yesterday but nothing, will check in w/them today and will update if any news.
Thanks, if you wouldn’t mind updating this thread when you hear something (or just dropping me a PM or email) I’d appriciate it. I have a trouble ticket in with Salvage Data, but since I suspect that this won’t be that difficult to retrieve, I’d like to try the cheaper alternative first.
Just got a call from Lazarus. First pass (software I think) didn’t work; the heads are stuck and won’t sweep across the platter. He needed my permission to bring it into the clean room to open it up. $125 for clean room and $100 for labor. If nothing’s damaged he should be able to offload the data to DVD’s, charge me something nominal for those and be done. Said he’d call me back in 3 hours & let me know if he was successful or more work/cost is necessary.
So that would be $225 total assuming nothing else is wrong? Sounds like that’s the way to go. The other place started at $600.
It’s been a couple of day, did they recover your data? Any additional charges?
He was supposed to call me back later on Tuesday afternoon. I called yesterday & left a message for him w/the receptionist (I get the sense it’s a pretty small place) to call me when he got off the phone; he didn’t. I plan to call them in a couple hours.
All this could mean he successfully migrated everything to DVD’s and has moved on to the next guy’s drive, or he accidentally dropped my drive into the shredder and is stalling to find a gentle way to tell me. I’m going on 2 weeks w/o my laptop so I’m getting a little anxious.
So this company had to remove the platters from your hard drive in a clean room and it’s only going to cost you $225? That seems really inexpensive.
I’m thinking that it’s more like they replaced the controling board on the drive. My drive for example spins up just fine…and when I plug it into an external SATA connector it shows up very briefly on my laptop as a new hardware device. But then it just goes away. So I suspect that it’s faulty electronics on the controling board, not something physically wrong with the drive.
OK, just spoke to Lazarus. He’s trying to clone my drive to his and the first day things were going very slowly. He was only getting 13% recovery and many errors. Then yesterday it shot up to 21%, and right now it’s at 47%. This tells him that it is a working drive, and once (if) he has a 100% clone rate he’ll have two opportunities- my drive and his- to recover any data that was lost. He thinks the errors he was getting in the beginning were for the OS rather than my data.
Evidently this is usually a process of a few hours, but in this case it’s taking a few days. He said he’d try to give me a call tomorrow with more info.
We’re still operating under the original $225, and I guess it means he’s not yet had to remove the platters.
Incidentally, all of this is just words to me; I’m not sure what any of it means but I like that the percentage is increasing. At least that means something to me.