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Many places offer free analysis, and you only pay after they characterize what they can recover. |
See also
Hard drives will fail
- https://www.backblaze.com/hard-drive.html
- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
Data Recovery Services
Seagate Data Recovery
DriveSavers
- Oliver got great customer service from DriveSavers.
Tip, if using DriveSavers
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- The extra large time window gives their engineers a catch-as-catch-can approach, as they deal with 80-100 shipments/ day. And when it's slow, they can apparently offer this "hidden" promotion. They only made this offer after they had done a preliminary (free) evaluation of the actual drive and gave us a much more tightly bounded cost estimate. Also, they reported that what they saw gave them the confidence to report of a high probability of success (increasing the chance they'd get paid since they don't get paid if not data recovered!)
Work situations so far (data points)
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- 2nd instance, 8/2014: External USB drive failed, and user had not backup, per se for information he felt was valuable. The first quote was ~$700-2,300. When they got the drive, it was in the ~$2K range. User didn't want to do that, so drive sent back, all at no cost to us.
- If you ask them to provide a drive to send your data back (instead of providing one to them yourself), they charge $109 for a 1TB external USB hard drive
- 1st instance (~Fall 2013?), 5/13: We ended up not using the service in one complicated instance (Multiple drives with h/w RAID). They helped us determine if we wanted to recover a hard drive based on likely price, outcomes, and our fall-back.
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