A friend of mine just posted a call for help on myspace. The hard drive containing his feature film, which he has spent at least a year making, appears to have met an untimely end. Mood: hysterical. Can anyone recommend a good information recovery service or have any advice I can pass along to him?
(First piece of advice, of course, is to back everything up. I don’t know what steps he has taken in this regard. I all know is that the hard drive with the movie is not responding.)
First thing to tell him is NOT to do anything with the drive, yet. Any write operations will potentially destroy data that could otherwise have been recovered. I would remove the drive physically from the machine, if at all possible, and store it someplace safe while checking out recovery options. The important thing is not to do anything which could cause further loss of data. I’ll leave it at this for now, and let others with more experience with critical data recovery give more detailed advice.
Normally I would suggest putting the drive in a ziplock bag and throwing it in your freezer for a bit. I’m not sure why it works, but this move gives your drive a few precious minutes of operating time… enough to grab the data off it and put it on a more stable drive.
In this case, it sounds like the data is ultra-important and this would be a dumb move. If it didn’t work, it would surely ruin the data even more.
I’d follow the links from the Google ads at the bottom of this post and pay a professional to get that movie back. It won’t be cheap, I’m sure, but neither will re-recording that whole movie.
And now that I’ve posted, the ads contain nothing about hard drive recovery. Fantastic.
Depends on how valuable the data is;
Cost is no object valuable
1: STOP trying to “fix it”. This can actually cause more damage than the initial fault.
2: Contact a data retrieval company (there are lots of them)
3; Write check for several hundred to several thousand dollars.
Cost is an object
1: Determine if the fault is media related or electronic
2: If media (ie drive runs but no useful data access) related chill the drive in fridge (not the freezer section) for approx 1/2 hour then try to reboot . If no luck try a commercial data retrieval program like Stellar Phoenix. They have a very good rep.
3:If electronic (ie drive & motor is stone dead) & not the platter try to buy an identical drive off eBay (or at retail if still available) and attach the IO board to the drive & use the new electronics to pull off the data.
I’ve used Drivesavers before with good, albeit expensive, results. As astro said, it can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Edited to add that I’ve used the freeze drive and then reinsert in computer method, which worked in my case but may not in his. It depends on what caused the failure.
I’ll repeat the vote for Drivesavers.
They’re not cheap, but they’re best of breed.
If your friend’s lucky, nothing worse happened to the drive than having the master file table get clobbered and they can fix that with software. If things got really scrambled, they can do a sector-by sector dump into a set of really huge text files, and your friend can wade through that to find the words. This is probably the “worst case” recoveryt scenario. Usually, you send Drivesavers a bad drive and they send you CDs/DVDs full of your recovered files.
If the drive has physically failed, they can do everything from repairing or replacing the circuit board on up to disassembling the drive in a clean room and transplanting the platters to a working mechanism. This is where the serious costs start happening.
Your friend may have a chance at recovering his data (provided that the drive still spins up) with the help of the relatively cheap program File Scavenger.
I had a friend that had a hard drive crash (200GB) a while back, about 40GB of ripped music as well as personal financial documents and a novel that he was working on were at risk of being lost. Figuring he had nothing to lose (he wasn’t going to pay untold hundreds of dollars to attempt recovery), i had him pull the drive and ship it to me prior to him resorting to a professional service.
Once i received tha drive, i installed it in a portable enclosure and connected it to my PC via USB 2.0. Once conected, i fired up File Scavenger and was able to recover about 98% of his data. I then reformatted his drive, re-installed his files and sent the drive back to him. The program goes about US$50 for a single license and you can download it on a trial basis before purchase. I don’t think that he’ll have full functionality, but should be able to determine whether the program can ‘see’ the drive (and files) prior to laying out the coin. It basically took me all weekend to perform the recovery (keeping in mind that it was the first time i had used the program and was being extremely careful), but it certainly was worth it. I have since used the program a couple of more times with equally good success; again, provided that the drive will spin up, and highly recommend it.
Going forward, if he can afford it, he should buy another drive and a RAID controller. If he can swing that, set the array up to mirror, which will write exactly the same info to both drives, and, should he experience a crash again, the other drive will have his data. This is the best way to protect the data without having to resort to software programs or remembering to perform the backups himself. The downside is that becouse of writing to 2 drives, he will take a performance hit. He can get around that somewhat by doing his editing and capture work on a non-RAID drive and saving to the mirrored drives. I do realize that not everybody is willing (or able) to load their computers with drives (i have 5 hard drives and 3 optical drives in my box), but if his data is that important to him, it’s something he should consider.
Good luck,