A close Tech friend at work nearly got canned because a pc in his department drive failed. The critical work data was backed up. But this lady staffer had two years of email on her pc. It wasn’t on the mail server anymore. She was a big shot and raised all kinds of hell.
All the tech people around campus thought the drive could be sent somewhere and the data recovered. It was a mechanical failure. The data is sitting right there on the platters. I even privately suggested he send it in himself and pay the costs. That’s better than losing a 40k job.
The Tech checked around and they wanted a thousand bucks just to look at the drive!! :eek: Recovery could run up into the multiple thousands. The dept choose not to recover the data. Instead they wrote the Tech up and he’s on probation for six months.
We’re in the thirtieth year for office pc’s. Why hasn’t a routine, low cost data recovery industry emerged? Say $250 to recover data. That stings just enough to encourage data backups.
As I understand your story, an end user had her email (PST files or the equivalent) stored on her local desktop computer’s hard drive. The drive failed and they’re blaming the technician? How is that his fault? I know that the users here are encouraged to keep their important data on the network drive and there is no policy or procedure to back up the hard drives on individual desktop systems.
As for your question, the answer is that data recovery costs so much because it’s difficult to do.
This is the answer. Drives are smaller, and pack data on much tighter. When a drive has a mechanical failure, it’s a lot of work to get that data off a physically damaged piece of hardware. If it were easy, it would be cheaper.
Because recovering data from a damaged drive isn’t as simple as just plugging the drive into the “recovery machine” and pressing the “go” button.
You need someone with the skills and knowledge to troubleshoot and disassemble a drive. These people generally don’t work for minimum wage.
You need specialized tools and a clean room type of environment (the inside of a hard drive has to be kept clean of dust or the platters and heads can be damaged). Maintaining a clean room costs a lot of money.
You need to keep spare parts for hundreds and hundreds of different types of drives around. Controller cards, heads, and platters are not universally swappable.
If you think you can do all of that and provide services for $250 a pop, go for it. You’ll get a lot of business.
(btw, if I were that tech dude, I would quit and go someplace where I couldn’t be fired because of a random hardware failure. Nothing like punishing an innocent employee because they weren’t able to do the impossible.)
You need an ultra clean room and an identical drive with identical electronics and heads. You have to have the expertise to disassemble and reassemble a super fragile device. This ain’t no job for a shade tree mechanic.
Who stores their emails on their personal computer anyway? Maybe he’s getting blamed for improper backup protocol on the company servers.
This tech was hired by this division (its several depts) to fully support their IT. That includes designing a data backup plan. Which he did. He even used Norton Ghost to reimage drives in the labs.
But he missed saving emails on pcs. Depending on how its configured, a copy of email can be left on the server and still delivered & stored to the pc. The lady was a big shot with a nasty attitude and a big voice. He’s lucky to still have a job.
Makes me very thankful to be in a smaller dept and better boss.
How are you so sure? Do you have any idea what went wrong? Is the platter scratched? Warped? Broken? Maybe it is something simple, and maybe it isn’t. To get to the data, someone will have to physically open the drive, make it spin, yadda yadda yadda, in a totally dust-free place so as not to make the situation worse, etc etc etc. This kind of work is very difficult, very expensive, and there is no guarantee of success.
Want proof of the above? If it could be done more cheaply, then – just as you suggest – someone would have already done so and cornered the market on it. More likely, people have actually tried to do so, and realized that it couldn’t be done any cheaper than it is.
There’s two kinds of disk recovery out there. In the first case, the drive mechanics still work but the data on the drive got messed up somehow. The disk may power up but you may have trouble reading from it. In the second case, the mechanics of the drive itself has failed. This prevents the drive from powering up or moving the read heads.
In the first case, there are companies which will slowly extract all the data from the working drive and try to fix up the data on a new drive. The cost for this type of service is in the range of $250-400. Since the drive still works, it’s just a matter of using the disk driver to move the heads to each sector and salvage whatever data it can.
In the second case, someone has to fiddle with the drive in a special environment to try to extract the data from the platters. This is much harder and that why it costs thousands.
Several years ago, the hard drive in one of the desktop computers here failed and the user wanted to recover it. We used Kroll Ontrack for this. At the time (and this was June 2007, so the numbers presumably have changed) the cost was $100 to evaluate the drive and tell us exactly which files could be recovered and then they would charge $500-2500 for actually recovering them.
As I remember, there are two big companies in this business; Ontrack and Drivesavers.
That explains the high cost. More companies and more volume would push prices down.
I know one issue is getting an intact file. The dept at work choose not to pay for the hard disk recovery because there was no guarantee of an intact file. A recovered email container file is useless unless Outlook can open it. Two years of email would be a scrambled mess if the file was corrupt.
I’ve used their services before. Once a sales exec’s drive had failed, just as he was working on a contract worth millions. He’d been away from site and it wasn’t backed up. The thousands it cost to recover was small beer in comparison to the value of the contract. Another time, a power outage hosed a server, the day before the weekly backup. The bill would have been over £10K. They opted to have everyone come in and redo their work instead.
There’s just not that much call for this type of work. Disks don’t fail that much, and most people don’t care about the data. The ones that do care about the data have good backup strategies.
In this day and age, even several thousand dollars is a bargain to fix basic negligence. Think of it this way, a white collar worker makes many tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Most of their work is stored in electronic form on a computer. The cost to manually recreate the files easily exceeds the recovery cost many times over even if it can be done at all.
Even individual consumers might have several thousand dollars of irreplaceable work stored on a home computer. The price to fix it sounds high at first but most people expect to pay at least that much when they blow the engine or transmission on their vehicle. The difference is many things like photos can’t be replaced ever if you don’t keep current backups. I am just thankful that such services exist and would use them if I had to but I won’t ever because I keep current backups in triplicate with one online and accessible from anywhere. I have had to rely on my backups more than once including after a complete hard drive failure. I had everything back myself in 3 hours.
I advise everyone to devise a good backup strategy NOW for themselves because it isn’t that hard or expensive. You can pay for online backup services like www.mozy.com for a few dollars a month and external hard drives can be had for less than $70 and they almost always come with free backup software. You really should use both.
Supposedly, our stuff is regularly backed up to storage farms in two different states. We’re west coast and the backups are midwest and east coast. The theory is that one natural disaster won’t take out all three.
Of course when I heard about it, years ago and about to happen. In theory, they found the budget for it.
As someone who has “recovered” his own drive once, I can attest that getting spare parts is not cheap.
I knew the problem was on the controller board, and that the platters and data itself was fine, so all I had to do was go online and find an identical hard drive, buy it, swap the board, get data off old hard drive, put board back on original drive, and now I have another hard drive!
Oh, but if it were that simple…well, ok, it IS that simple, in theory…but that first step is a doozy. Unless the hard drive is fairly new, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find an identical one online. It’s not enough to just get the right make and size, or even make, model, and size. You have to get as damn close to the original as possible, ideally, the same lot number, if not that, then at least made in the same time period from the same factory…if you can’t get those to line up, there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to swap boards.
I got lucky, I couldn’t find the same lot number, but did find one that had the same factory code, made in the same year…the board looked a little different when I swapped, but it did work, and I got my data off, and I learned an important lesson about backing things up.
Or easy. I’ve attempted some do-it-yourself hard drive recovery, and it’s a lot of hassle. If you value your time and sanity at all, a few hundred bucks is a bargain compared to a weekend of pulling your hair out without anything to show for it.
As long as we’re talking about data recovery on the cheap there’s always the freezer trick. Supposedly throwing your hard drive in the freezer to cool overnight will buy you a few minutes of useful life to access your data. Or if you’re particularly desperate you can try booting it upside down or giving it a good whack to hopefully jolt it to life.
Those prices are typical for average user who wants their pictures back and such. Faster turn around or more complex hard drive arrangements like RAID are much more.
Buddy of mine worked at a place where a server had two hard drives in a 3 disk RAID5 died. It was tuesday afternoon with paychecks due on friday. The daily backup would not work, closest that they had was 3 weeks old. They drove the drives up to Drivesavers and requested a “next day” recovery They got it all back, and a bill for $26,000. They figured better that than waiting a week and getting hit for not depositing payroll taxes and such on 300 employees, on top of millions of dollars in open invoices that would be lost.
The problem we had is that my company needs an exact quote to issue a PO, so the approach that Drivesavers takes where they can’t tell you an amount until they’re done will not work. So the Ontrack model, where there is a fixed price for an evaluation and then you get a quote for the exact amount to recover the files worked better.