Does data recovery actually work?

I have used drivesavers about 20 times with clients over the years. They have never failed me yet. They do a free evaluation and will tell you if data is recoverable.

They are pricey $1500-$2500 for typical single drive jobs, but they are good in my experience

Okay, this is all fantastic info guys. We do have an OnTrack here (I’m in Melbourne, Australia) so I will contact them. They say they have a “no data no fee” policy and a base fee of $550, which matches closely to what Guy Incognito paid. I think if that’s all it costs me, I am inclined to think it’s worth it. These are important files, and I do have that much available for emergencies on this level (which is to say medium level).

From what I’ve read online, the lack of clicking and the appearance of the drive in my Device Manager (but no drive letter and no files found with a data recovery app) I think it likely to be a controller card problem, so all they’d do is, as many have suggested, swap it into an equivalent with a different controller card and the files should all be there. If it’s that simple it should be the lowest fee, I am hoping.

I have a second much older hard drive that is doing the clicking thing that I had hoped to recover some day in the future when I was desperate for it or had money to burn. This current problem is more important to me to get done sooner than that one, though.

I will contact OnTrack and update here if there’s any development.

Back in the day, my co-worker’s laptop drive failed spectacularly. It cost the company about $3000 to retrieve the data from it, but I think everyone learned their lesson about backing up.

My single experience may be too ancient to be relevant, but here goes. The PC I had in 2002 was running the Windows XP disk defrag utility when something went seriously wrong and the machine crashed. I took it to a local data recovery company (in Toronto) and about 600 dollars Canadian later when I got it back they had managed to recover about 70% of the data files but none of the software. They returned the disk, I had acquired a new one and reinstalled what I could from the spotty backups I had, so only ran the repaired disk long enough to copy the recovered files. As the previous replies have said, recovery outcomes will depend on the nature of the failure. I never learned why the defrag failed so spectacularly, and it certainly taught me the importance of regular backups.

No offense meant, and I apologize if it sounded mean. We’ve all been there to some degree, as this thread demonstrates (you noticed that I was looking into data recovery at one point? I think that shows whether my backups have always been perfect or not…)

GuanoLad,

There was one other time years ago when I had to attempt to recover data from a drive that had been partially reformatted by a user doing God knows what. Anyway, on that occasion I downloaded and used a program called Diskinternals NTFS Recovery. It was slow going, but eventually I was able to recover the missing data and migrate it onto a replacement drive. I checked the Diskinternals site and they offer a free download that you can use to determine if data is recoverable on your drive before buying the program. The purchase price for a personal copy of NTFS Recovery is $99.95 USD. (https://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/)

UPDATE TIME: After saving up some money, and trying as long as I could to survive without my lost files, I finally sent my hard drive to OnTrack to rescue what they could. Because it had not been clicking I had hoped it would be a simple electronics failure, but it wasn’t. At least half the files were corrupted and unrecoverable, so it was a hardware failure, sectors that had high file churn I think. I agreed to them continuing and was updated regularly throughout the process.

I received the disk today, divided up between three sections: Fully rescued files; Partially rescued but potentially salvageable; Extra things they found but now anyone’s guess where they came from or even will open. I’ll spend the next week sorting through them all.

I got a lot of stuff back, including some of the most important work files I needed, though lost quite a lot of historic things I had great affection for. The price they charged was higher than I hoped (AU$1500) but worth it. Now I just need to back things up on the reg, both locally and online. Can anyone recommend a good reliable (cheap or free) backup website?

Amazon S3 is OK; for long-term backups you can even put them in freeze (about $4/terabyte/month) or deep freeze ($1/TB/month)

I use Backblaze for continuous online backups. It’s $110 for two years, so about ten bucks a month and that’s for unlimited backups. If you only have a small amount, you might find something cheaper but I like this backs up everything, all the time. So every little changed file or file added is backed up. (I also do backups to external USB hard drives, but only every couple of weeks.)

I like to use Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows for my local backup needs. You can schedule full or incremental backups of your drive(s) pretty quickly and easily. Download and install the software, create bootable recovery media for your PC (DVD, ISO file, USB flash drive), then set up your backup schedule. Data can be backed up to a locally-connected external drive or NAS on your home network. I’ve used it at home and at work to backup and recover drives without a hitch using the free version, so the price is definitely nice!

Check it out: Free Windows Backup Solution for PCs and Endpoints

That software looks good, I might give that a try. I did have a decent piece of software (Allway Sync) that compared files and updated any changes every few hours, good for recovering an accidental delete or overwrite. Initially I’ll use that again and see if it’s still a good fit for me.

Backblaze for off-site, though, sounds like a good option. Definitely will be signing up for that.

Do you use NAS? If so, can you say which one you have? I’ve been looking to do this solution after my laptop hard drive died and I sent to a service but they weren’t able to recover anything :frowning:

I’ve used Veeam Agent for recovering individual files and folders from nightly incremental backups and it works great. Once you get that initial image backup out of the way, the incremental backups are usually pretty quick.

I actually use this same software for backing up a couple of servers at our retail locations and it works like a charm, too!

I’ve used and older Seagate Black Armor and Buffalo LinkStation NAS devices with Veeam Agent with great success. Depending on what your home router is, you might even be able to connect a USB external drive to your router and set it up as a shared drive so that you can back up to that. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it to work with an older LaCie 2TB drive on my new Linksys AC2150 router, but no big whoop. Both of the PCs in our house have external drives on them anyway, but I wanted to centralize things without having to shell out the bucks for a decent NAS device.

This looks like exactly what I need. Thanks!

@Slash1972 Synology is also a good choice. I’ve used them for years and they include a backup agent out of the box that will also integrate with OneDrive, Google Drive, and others for cloud backup.