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A colleague of mine has just advised me after her hard drive failed that her local IT shop is going to recover her data (sadly her mum passed and it’s all photos of her and her degree work) and that it’s going to take a month! Now I work in IT but no experience of data recovery but this doesn’t sound right to me, the laptop is 3 years old, so I’m guessing a minimum HD of 500Gb but still?? Any thoughts from you experts?

Jo

~:-)

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I’ll bet that’s close. Depending on the nature of the failure, your local IT shop is not equipped to tear down and rebuild a failed hard drive (other than a failed logic board)

I’m sure they’re sending the drive out to a third party data recovery service and charging your colleague a little extra to facilitate the recovery.

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I did wonder as I can’t imagine they have the expertise onsite, I have asked my colleague to get a breakdown of the cost and the tasks they are performing so she can be assured she’s not being ripped off, plus I’m actually quite interested in the techie side of this. Many thanks for the sanity check.

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You’re welcome. I haven’t looked into pricing in a while, but the last time I did it was not cheap ($1,000+)

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Hmmmm that’s the other thing, when she said a month I did say that could be very expensive because you should have either got a fixed price quote or they will charge you hourly and she said they hadn’t provided her a quote!! Shocking I really feel for this girl.

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I would advise that she ask the IT shop for a quote. She doesn’t want to get stung with a surprise bill that she can’t afford. If they are sending it to a HDD recovery shop it could easily cost within the thousands of dollars.

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I worked with Kroll/Ontrack for recovery on my last job. I never had anything they couldn’t recover, even with encrypted drives. Prices for our normal jobs (standard desktop drives, standard turnaround) were around $1,500 and they turned the drive around in about than a week with the total cost upfront.

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When I had my own shop I did some basic data recovery. Initial scan of a drive can take a few days as the recovery software tries to work around bad spots. After that I would provide a price, because I’d know how bad things were. Total turn around was never more than 2 weeks though, and usually considerably less.

If the initial scan showed that I couldn’t get the data back I would refer them to @DriveSavers, Inc. - they provide free next day shipping, then give a price quote. Turn around time with them varies depending on what you want to pay for, but I don’t recall it every being more than 2 weeks.

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If the drive has actual physical failure and recovery software won’t work it will need a professional recovery service with a cleanroom to avoid any further data loss. The local IT service shops will either risk trying to do the recovery in house or most will send it out to a professional recovery service.

The Data Rescue Center offers affordable recovery pricing starting at $400 to $1,000 and provides a free quote & diagnosis.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

http://www.thedatarescuecenter.com

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If the drive has actual physical failure and recovery software won’t work it will need a professional recovery service with a cleanroom to avoid any further data loss. The local IT service shops will either risk trying to do the recovery in house or most will send it out to a professional recovery service.

The Data Rescue Center offers affordable recovery pricing starting at $400 to $1,000 and provides a free quote & diagnosis.

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thanks for all your replies, I have advised her that she must ring the shop back and get the quote, we are based in the UK and so I appreciate all the replies from you overseas guys. Many thanks again.

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