I’m bumping this one last time both in hopes that corkboard got his data recovered, and because someone else just asked a question about a crashed hard drive.
Waiting patiently for the call.
Just an update. Despite the better looking price, the sluggish response that corkboard seemed to get prompted me to go ahead and send my drive to Salvage Data for recovery. I just recieved the quote from them. $1438 to recover our data. And they’re not sure that it’s actually recoverable. While it sucks, there really isn’t any question about doing it. All our our digital pictures of the kids and our vacations are on there. There is no replacing that stuff. Hopefully we’ll get it all back in the next couple of weeks. And you can be sure that even though we now have a Drobo which has a RAID - like data recovery system built in, I will also be archiving the pictures at least to several other places.
sigh
How did yours go corkboard?
That’s weird- I was just coming in to search for this thread and provide an update. In a nutshell- good thing you went with Salvage Data.
I’ve been corresponding with a guy from Lazarus for almost a month now. Last Tuesday was the most recent call; he was optimistic that within the next day or two he’d have extracted all of my data, copied it to DVDs and would send them to me. All along he’s been very informative, patient and knowledgeable. I only understand a fraction of what he’s been telling me, but he has always given me a fairly plain-English bottom line synopsis that carries me for another couple of days.
I hadn’t heard from him for a couple days so last Thursday, 10/30, I called on my way home from work- no answer. Not even a recorded message, much less the receptionist or the guy himself. Odd- it was mid-afternoon in San Fran, where they’re based. Friday I was busy and didn’t think about it.
I called today at 1:30 Eastern. Again, no answer. I sent an email to the Sales address on their website- returned as undeliverable. Fuck.
I called the FTC, who referred me to the NJ Attorney General/Consumer Protection Agency, who referred me to the CPA of California, who referred me to the California Department of Consumer Affairs, who referred me to the CA Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair. I filed my complaint an hour ago.
I think the guy shut his doors. He has in my possession about 3,000 photos, 6,000 music files, a few hundred documents (including a spreadsheet of all of our accounts with logins and passwords), 4 years worth of tax returns, a year’s worth of emails, plus various and sundry items that I can’t even recall, much less replace. The music and photos were backed up about 10 months ago but we’ve added many since then; the documents were backed up about 4 months ago excluding additions since then.
Looking back- assuming the worst at this point- I should have suspected something like this. The price was too low. But if the guy was going out of business, or never had any intention of following through, why wouldn’t he soak me for more money? It would make more sense if he had to charge me $500 here, another $1,000 there, etc. All I paid him was $225.
No suspicious activity has been reported on any of my accounts, credit monitoring agencies are all status quo, no account activity of any kind that we can’t explain as not being our own transactions. I’m puzzled by the whole thing (when I’m not fantasizing about clobbering the “guy” I’m picturing behind the whole thing.) I’m holding out hope that there’s nothing nefarious going on, but growing more concerned, angry, helpless and worried by the hour.
Ouch…just…ouch. I’m sorry to hear about that. As I told the account manager while giving my credit card info, it’s difficult to send basically your life to a bunch of people that you don’t know. Aside from the fear of being taken advantage of, it’s also a lot of personal data that you really don’t want falling into the wrong hands. Like you, I have tax returns, music, movies, pictures, program files, and just about anything else I can think of on that one drive. It was the original drive we used when we first started moving towards digital storage, so it had just about everything on it. It hurts to pay that much, but really there isn’t any choice…that data doesn’t reside anyplace else except that drive. I’m expecting an update when they get the data off of it and hopefully it’ll be back to me in a week or so for me to validate.
It is strange that the guy didn’t try and get more money from you, but that could be good in that he isn’t malicious. Just went out of business. So you might be able to get in touch with him in a few days somehow (once his own despondance over going out of business is a bit less) and see if you can get your drive back. True you’ll be out the $225, but at least you’ll have the physical drive back to try another service. Good luck man, and drop me an email or something to let me know how it works out. Assuming the Mods don’t mind, I’ll probably bump this thread one last time when all is said and done to recap my overall expirience.
Aren’t you being a bit premature? He’s obviously a one-man company, so maybe he’s gone on holiday or something?
I’ve used drivesavers for a very critical art department external hard drive recovery, theywere very professional and got the data back. Of course it can get expensive but probably worth the price for 5 years of pictures.
Since this was bumped I’ll add a quick update.
I recieved an external drive in the mail a few days ago that had all the recovered data. While I haven’t been through every picture, movie, and file it does look like everything was sucessfully recovered. I have to admit that after getting the $1400 quote for the work and ok’ing it around 12pm, getting a call at 8am the next day telling me the data was recovered and ready to be shipped back was a triffle irritating. If it was that quick and easy, why did I pay so much? Unless just walking in the clean room costs a grand, I don’t know what else they were doing to justify that amount of money.
They did give me a 10% discount because they’re a Western Digital prefered lab, so including the cost of the external drive and the discount, the total was around $1475 or so. I can’t complain because like Bongmaster said, the pictures and movies on that drive were irriplaceable.
While I hope nobody ever has to use this service, if you do have data that you absolutly must recover, I would recommend Salvage Data.