When searching for ways to recover your files from a failing hard drive, you may be surprised to see how much hard drive recovery services charge to get all of your data back. The price tag for a single hard drive recovery can be several hundreds of dollars, or potentially over a thousand for more severe cases. Understanding the steps involved in data recovery will help you to determine if the data is worth the cost of the recovery. After all, the cost of not having your important files recovered could far outweigh the expense.
In order to recover your files from a failing drive, data recovery services need to run various diagnostics to figure out what needs to be repaired on the drive. Once repairs are made, the drive is then cloned so that the data can be restored onto a healthy drive. The repairs needed vary greatly, depending on the cause of the drive failure. This also varies depending on the media storage device that you are looking to get your data back from.
The most common types of hard drives that usually fail are standard rotational hard drives, which are the most common hard drive used today, but also have a higher failure rate due to the mechanical parts involved. A disc drive contains a physical disc called the platter, where the files are written to and stored. There is also a mechanical arm that hovers over the platter that does the reading and writing of data, which is typically what will fail or break the most on the hard drive. Any kind of physical damage these drives take, such as being dropped from a desk, can affect the mechanical parts and possibly result in a hard drive failure.
Instances Where Data Recovery Services Are Unnecessary
In cases of accidental deletion, the recovery process could be as simple as running a file recovery software. Recovering from this scenario is not as complicated as physical recoveries and can be done by any home user. When recovering from an accidental deletion in Data Rescue, the software will warn you if it is having trouble scanning your hard drive by alerting you of read errors. If this is the case, stop the scan and contact a professional service to repair the drive, otherwise, the data or drive can become damaged further. Continuing to use a failing drive will make a physical recovery of the drive more complicated, resulting in a more expensive recovery and possibly making the data unrecoverable. If a software solution is not possible, the drive must be physically repaired so the data can be read and extracted to another healthy hard drive.
Why You Should Not Perform A Hard Drive Repair At Home
A service is a professional data recovery facility that specializes in recovering important files from hard drive failures. They have highly skilled technicians that have serviced all kinds of media devices. This is one of the first recovery facilities to come into the business and is a great example what a professional data recovery service should look like and what you should expect.
Any Youtube video that tells you that you can easily repair your hard drive yourself at home you should immediately disregard. These videos are amateurs giving mostly false information and often getting their information from novice technicians that have not dealt with all kinds of hard drive failures. A hard drive cannot be properly diagnosed to know exactly what the issue is without the drive being examined by a certified technician using expensive recovery tools in a lab.
Repairing a hard drive is not a job that just anyone should do since it requires a specified cleanroom and expensive tools to get the best recovery results. Disassembly and repair of traditional disc drives absolutely must be done in a certified and maintained clean room, otherwise, you are risking the integrity of your files. The cleanroom is to ensure no dust or other particles in the air make contact with the drive’s platter surfaces, which could affect how the data is read. For severe repairs, parts must be ordered and used to repair the drive and must be an exact fit for that particular drive. For best possible recovery, a certified technician must be trained and experienced for the work as well, to ensure there is no risk of platter scoring when working on your hard drive.
There are many tools and classifications a certified recovery facility must have in order to have the best chance of recovering all of your files. Some data recovery services will advertise low recovery prices that may sound appealing, but they lack the tech and skills of a professional recovery facility. The Data Rescue Center maintains the most up-to-date tech to recover your data, while still being around 20 to 30% cheaper than our competitors with a similar facility.
Quality Of The Data Rescue Center
The loss of important data can be a disaster. Whether it is financial or business documents, family photos or videos, when you can’t access your files it can be devastating. However, data recovery companies specialize in solving this problem.
It’s your data; one of the first priorities should be the quality of customer service and involvement offered by the data recovery company.
Some things that The Data Rescue Center offers in their services include:
- Dedicated customer service representatives that can intelligently discuss your situation and offer possible solutions before anything is done. Give their qualified representatives a call and they can advise you as to whether a software solution is possible or if a physical repair is needed, and are able to perform both.
- Upon receiving your failed equipment, they create a detailed analysis of your situation, then generate and send you a report of what needs to be done.
- A free diagnosis and quote is prepared by the technician upon receiving the drive which details the repairs required and the cost for 100% of the data to be recovered. Any recovery less than 100% would decrease the quoted price, depending on the amount of data missing.
- Their representatives are good about staying in contact during each step of the process, keeping you involved and informed.
- The Data Rescue Center will also keep a temporary backup of your data for 30 days after the recovery, should you have problems with the returned files. If there are any issues, they will make it a priority to look into the situation so you are getting the data that you want back.
Choosing Your Recovery Professional
When dealing with a failing drive, it’s often difficult to decide how to proceed with data recovery. Deciding if a particular hard drive recovery service is right for you should be primarily based on the technology they have available and their reputation in using it. Each service will have their own lab, and often these labs use cleanroom technology to keep dirt, dust and other particles from the work area.
While some services specialize in NTFS file recovery (the file system that most Windows systems use) or Mac data recovery, others are capable of recovering data from almost anything that stores it. Some services also specialize in particular types of failing drives, like damage from natural disasters, or logical failure from software problems. These different types of problems require drastically different approaches, so you should choose your data recovery service accordingly. The Data Rescue Center stays up to date with the most advanced technology to recover from any drive type, whether it was formatted for Mac or Windows.
Before you ship off your hard drive or another storage device to a data recovery lab, you should take the time to research the lab’s reputation. If the data recovery service you’re considering has the proper certifications, and it’s hard to find any bad reviews of their services on the Internet then, chances are, you are in good hands. On the other hand, if the service you’re considering sounds a bit shady or has a lot of bad reviews, it might be best to just move along to someone else.
