Hard Drive Recovery Services Review
Why Use a Hard Drive Recovery Service?
The top performers in our review are SalvageData Recovery, the Gold Award winner; Secure Data Recovery, the Silver Award winner; and DriveSavers,
the Bronze Award
winner. Here's more on choosing a service to meet your
needs, along with detail on how we arrived at our ranking of 10
systems.
Data loss is an inevitable reality. Your hard drive will fail. Your
data will be irretrievable on your own. It can be as innocent as
deleting the wrong file and as serious as recovering a hard drive from a
charred computer after a house fire. Either way, you don't have to
concede defeat. Whether you're worried about critical files for your
business or you lost sentimental family videos, you can still recover
all or most of the data on your hard drive by sending it to one of the
best hard drive recovery services we reviewed.
There are two types of data recovery situations – logical recovery
and physical recovery. A logical data recovery occurs when you've
erroneously deleted, written over or accidentally reformatted a device.
Your data is actually still there. You just can't access it. For these
situations, you can use data recovery software
to retrieve the data at a fraction of the cost of a service. If the
software tools are too complicated or fail to recover the data
successfully, hard drive recovery services also perform logical data
recovery. However, physical recoveries are the vast majority of a hard
drive recovery service's business.
A physical recovery is required when the hard drive fails because
internal components have worn out or been damaged. For a physical
recovery, it's necessary to take the hard drive apart to diagnose the
problem. Sometimes it's as simple as replacing an actuator arm.
Sometimes it requires moving the data platters to a working hard drive.
If the service can't fix the hard drive by simply replacing a part, it
has to clone the data to a working hard drive so that it can piece the
data back together without damaging it. Performing such a recovery
requires skilled technicians working in a certified cleanroom, because
the smallest particles can scratch and damage the platters, making it
more difficult to recover the data completely.
Once the technicians have successfully recovered your data, they send
it back to you on a different hard drive, which you must provide.
Either you send the data recovery service an external hard drive or you
purchase one directly from it. For small amounts of data, typically less
than 12GB, many services provide the return media, usually a thumb
drive or DVD. You can also request an online transfer via secure FTP,
but this is generally limited to less than 5GB because the transfer is
time-consuming.
Hard drive recovery services aren't cheap. While most services
provide a free evaluation, you can expect to pay a set minimum fee of a
few hundred dollars, even if the recovery is relatively simple. Most
services don't charge by the amount of data they recover, but by the
tools and resources required to recover the data. This means that your
1TB hard drive could cost less to recover than your 250GB hard drive.
Every case is different, but your recovery costs could be $500 to over
$5,000 dollars depending on the situation. So be prepared to ask
yourself first if the files you want to recover are worth the cost.
In our hard drive recovery services review, we evaluated the hard
drive recovery procedures and policies of each service for a standard
hard drive recovery. For when you're in dire need of quick data
recovery, every service we reviewed offers emergency, high-priority
services, which puts technicians to work around the clock on your
recovery, but at a much higher cost.
