Data Recovery

[digidom]

Greetings all,

I have an external hard disk which has developed problems and its data is no longer readable in windows. Does anyone know a good data recovery service that is not too expensive.

Many thanks,

[Jim Michael]

The first thing to try is to move the hard drive to a different housing. Often it's the housing circuitry that's bad.

[cjbroadbent]

I've had that problem twice. The first time, a professional data recovery lab recovered 5 images out of 70 at a cost of 3000 Euro. The second time I got the 'Disk Doctors Data Recovery' program for $170.- and did it myself. I lost only 10 images out of 120.
It took me two days to choose that program out of a clamour of greedy touters.
It is an expensive one-shot remedy. By the time (touch wood) of the next crash, my OS and the program will be out of date.

[jp]

At my computer shop, they try accessing it with a linux computer to get the data off, and if that's not successful, they boot spinrite and use that to work around the bad parts. If that's not good, they put the drive in the freezer and try using it cold. Best prevention is to have important stuff backed up, and also to use quality hard drives (not lacie, hitachi, maxtor, etc..)

[Richard M. Coda]

Data Doctors (AZ) cost me $3000 a couple of years ago for 95% recovery. Hard disks are so cheap now that I always buy two identical units and back the main drive up every night. A couple of hundred dollars is much cheaper than $3k.

[Nathan Potter]

Just a year ago I had a similar problem. Now I back up the internal hard drive using two separately connected external drives about once a month. But I'm only up to about 300 GB of photo data so far. The long term accessibility of the data is more of a concern.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[digidom]

Thanks for all the helpful replies.

[Richard Mahoney]

Dear Dominic,


Thanks for all the helpful replies.

There's an old saying about all this -- `There are only two types of disk: those that are dead; and those about to die.'' This means that one has no option but to plan for disk failure. I simply cannot afford to loose material so have multiple copies -- local and remote -- of everything that matters. This starts with the main server -- RAID 1 with automatic failover and hot swap drives (decent HP SCSI), backed up to a local secondary `retired' server, backed up to a decent provider (Joyent), encrypted and backed up to Amazon S3. Server grade disks remain expensive, but I've found that they are only needed locally. For the rest, bandwidth and `cloud' storage are inexpensive.

Kind regards,

Richard

[Nathan Potter]

Richard, I think you are pretty safe! Of course that assumes you don't change your operating system, lose your encryption software or die. :eek:

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Michael Rosenberg]

Dominic,

I'll echo what Jim suggested. My 1.5 TGB external drive bit the dust. It was an OEM Western Digital drive and I installed it in a 3rd party housing. Before taking it to the computer shop I decided to just put in in a bay on the computer and test it on boot up. It worked just fine. Went our and bought a fan cooled case from NewEgg for $34. By the way, I recommend Acronis back up software - used it for years and it always came through.

Mike

[onnect17]

If you pay the return shipping I can take a look at it.

[Keith S. Walklet]

I recommend a product called DATA RESCUE by prosoft engineering. A friend turned me onto it. He had accidentally deleted his entire photo library, bought the software for $100 and got everything back. I had a external drive failure and did the same thing and recovered everything.

In contrast, one of my other friends had an external hard drive failure and lost a dozen weddings. He sent the drive to two different companies to try and recover the photos and neither was able to get anything off the drives. Multiple $1,000s of dollars for their effort.

I told him not to throw away the drives until I had a crack at them with Data Rescue. I recovered all but two corrupted files! This was a year later and my friend ended up calling all the brides he had disappointed a year earlier with 1 year anniversary present.

If the hardware issue doesn't pan out, this software is extraordinary. Even just for insurance purposes, having it on hand is worth every penny.

It comes in two flavors, MAC and PC. Here's a link to the PC version: http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc.php