Long story short; we’re on a working vacation with major deliverables hanging over our head—deliverables due in the next few days (well, yesterday—but that boat sailed).
The hard drive on a 15” Macbook Pro failed—confirmed after taking it to the Genius Bar at the Apple store. They ran what little diagnostics they could and are now replacing the drive.
We desperately need data off the drive. Everything was backed up, except a week or so of Entourage—a week of critical data.
What do we look for in a data recovery situation? Any guidance or advice as to how to choose? I know prices will be impossible to predict (nothing physical happened to the drive; it was in our possession the entire time), but any idea of the ranges? Oh, we’re in Las Vegas, if that makes a difference.
Main problem is with contacts and data from the past week or so. Oversimplifying–books are slated to go to print; peer reviewers sent comments. Some comments are first contacts, so we have no other information from them. Not all peer reviewers know each other.
Another thing, accessing the backups isn’t exactly easy. They’re in NY; we’re in Vegas. My mom is at home, babysitting the Dudeling. That’s not so bad, but not without problems. Lastly, there are 12 to 15 GB of data we need this week. A bit much for FTP. Not impossible, but data recovery may be a desirable option.
Right, I’ve found a few options… but I’m shopping blind. I can go best-guess, of course, but was wondering if anyone who’s been through it had pointers (i.e., make sure to ask these questions, look out for those services…). In the PC world, I’d hate to pay someone up to two grand to slave it to a working machine and run Undelete. If they’re the only ones with it, that’s a different story, but I’d rather know what’s going on ahead of time.
Tech Tool Pro is also one I have heard good things about. Of course, neither are bulletproof. If the information is truly critical, you may want to proceed directly to data recovery.
Yes, it will be expensive, but, if the magnetic domains are still on the platters, either of these companies can reassemble them.
Give 'em a call and see what they suggest. As for speed of service, Ontrack has a location in LA, and DriveSavers is in Novato, north of San Francisco. Depending on your level of panic, it may be worth the effort to drive over there from Las Vegas, rather than wait another day for FedEx.
When you say the drive died, can you hear it spin? If you can’t hear it spin up, you have major problems.
If you can hear it going, you can easily put it in an external case, and extract any data from it.
If you can’t hear it spin, try this.
Take a towel and wrap it around the palm of your hand. Then take the drive and hit it into the towel in the palm of your hand. Sometimes the handle (I forget the technical name right now) just gets stuck and doesn’t move. Hitting it jars it back to life, for a bit anyway.
If that doesn’t work freeze the drive for 12 hours. Usually this doesn’t work but some people have had luck with it. What it’s doing is it slightly altering the physical components of the drive and when they unfreeze they can sometimes come back to work long enough to get your data off the drive.
There are actually videos on how to take your drive apart and fix it. Basically do what the data recovery people do. I actually tried this and had success, but at the time I had access to all sorts of spare parts from other computers. If I had to do this, it’d have cost me at least $150.00 for the spare parts to the other drives. (Basically I had to take good drives and rip them apart to get the spare parts for my dead drive). They say you should do this in a completely sterile environment. I did not and it didn’t hurt, but I reckon I was just lucky rather and that being a good idea.
As others have said, it can cost anywhere from one to two thousand dollars and they won’t guarantee you get anything usable off the drive. Basically you’re paying for time and for the sterile environment they work in.
PC shop owner here…we have sent about 2 dozen jobs to drivesavers. They have never failed any of my customers that were sent there including a 2 out of 3 dead drives in a RAID-5 array just a couple weeks ago. They also offer overnight service but the cost ramps up quickly for fast service. I have seen a raid failure recovered overnight for $26K.