LOVE Hard drive Data Recovery Services

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.