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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
Ask if they are prepared to cut you a special deal if you are willing to wait 2-3 weeks (10-15 work days vs. 5-7 work days) for a turn-around. On 8/21/14, they offered us this deal to cut the cost of a recovery by $500 (from ~$2,000).
- 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)
The following instances gave us experience with their customer service, but we never followed through with the data recovery:
- 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, 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.
Info on DriveSavers
1-800-440-1904
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Your DriveSavers Program ID#: DS82034
Reference your exclusive Program ID# for automatic discounts and benefits when engaging DriveSavers. All members of your organization can use this number to ensure the following:
- Automatic Discounts up to 27%
- Free Evaluation Service
- Free Shipping Box or Label
- No Data, No Charge Policy
- Guaranteed Secure Facility
* SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, NIST, GLBA, SOX, FAR 52.224-2, and ISO 17799 compliant!
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Other info about DataSavers
This service is also used by The Computing Center.
Heard about, relatively randomly
One option found promises, "No Data - No Charge", and "We do not charge a diagnostic fee", http://www.datacent.com/.
Company is in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Is there a similar company in the US?
Found the above from this site:
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Contact ChemIT for consultation. Thank you.
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Roger writes (10/14/2013):
Looks like the best source for disk tools is the Ultimate Boot CD. It’s got working
- SEATools (V 1.12 txt and 2.23 GUI version)
- WD DataLifeguard Diag 4.15 (Older drives) and 5.20 (bigger than 8.4 GB)
- HDDErase 3.3 and 4.0
And many more…
Note – the Windows version of WD utilities does show hours run, the DOS version does not.
Info:
HDDerase 3.3 required for SSD’s