Data recovery - rip off or worth it?

Johnmcl7

Kroll Ontrack is the one I've used a few times for data recovery for failed company hard drives, they're not cheap but I trust their work. I've looked into organising data recovery for personal drives when I've been unable to do it through software, they've not proceeded when I've warned them the cost is likely to be high.

It's difficult to find suitable companies as doing a software recovery is relatively easy although time consuming but hardware recovery is highly specialised and if they make a mess of it then it's unlikely it would be possible to try again with a different company.

poppellerant

How large is the hard drive? You can buy a 128GB USB 3.0 stick for under £30 here. Of course, check that they will be happy to transfer your data onto your own USB stick.

W00dy11

Thank you the information was very useful

System

W00dy11 wrote: »

File System Rebuild - £145
Read/Write Head Transplant - £195
Unreadable Sector Remap - £145
Required Parts (New read/write heads) - £100
-15% Discount for online quote
TOTAL Cost excluding VAT - £497.25

This is still only payable if they recover data.

So basically I am trying to decide if this is a big rip off. Company is called DTL data recovery

Proper data recovery is not cheap. It wasn't that long ago that recovering 20GB would cost you several hundred quid.

I bet you're wishing you'd backed up now and with solutions ranging from free to not a lot there's no excuse not to.

W00dy11

Yeah thanks for the judgement 😁 they say pain is an excellent teacher!

dipsomaniac

its difficult not to back up these days. are you sure you have never installed software like dropbox, google drive, onedrive etc that you can recover some media/data from?

Undervalued

Tarambor wrote: »

I bet you're wishing you'd backed up now and with solutions ranging from free to not a lot there's no excuse not to.

Easy to say but I have recently had to help a friend with a similar problem and they had made quite diligent attempts at backing up. A combination of bad luck and a bit of a lack of technical understanding meant they were just as stuck.

I also knew a photographer who, quite rightly, makes multiple backups of his digital images. However, many years worth of film negatives and transparencies were stored in cardboard boxes directly underneath some very dodgy plumbing! Few people in the film days shot two or three copies of every photo and stored them in separate locations.....