I don't back up my whole hard drive, but I do have a flash drive with all the pictures of my daughter and a few important documents on it. Things like my music and my favorites list would be nice to have if my computer dies, but I can get all that stuff again. If my pictures of my daughter get deleted, I just lost all those memories and that would suck.

thesuperpet

I have done this a couple times (for clients, not my personal computers) and I am not sure if I am more shocked by the $1500-2000 pricetag or the fact that the client never even bats an eye at the cost, when they could have avoided it entirely by doing backups.

coryj

1st LifeHacker post.

This article is kinda appropriate considering how badly I munged a storage drive last night. 70GB of music, books & other stuff gone while trying to resize a partition. Partition Magic's partition resizer has never lost data on me, so when I was using another companies (Avast maybe? I don't remember it's on the WindowsPE disk at home) I didn't even give it a second thought. Oops. It was a stupid mistake, but I found this freeware utility called PCInspector which is in the process of restoring the files on the screwed up partition to another drive in my PC.

Thank DEITY$ for German freeware.

Jaysyn

@JeffDrake: Oooh, I forgot that one. Just added it!

Gina Trapani

Errr . . . where's the option for "No, because I do my own backups and have never had a crash"?

I backup everything important with Mozy, but I've never had a crash, so I don't really fit any of those responses

JeffDrake

I remember working in the lab in University years ago, and some poor guy came over to me nearly in tears.

The masters thesis that he was working on for a couple of years was all on ONE SINGLE aging diskette that stopped working. No copies anywhere else. I felt sorry for the guy but at the same time i wanted to slap him.

We couldn't recover the files on the disk but he had some relatively recent hardcopies that we managed to scan + OCR back in.

Nowadays theres no excuse for not backing stuff up. Storage is cheap and theres lots of software that will do it for you.

Dravidian

@MADANTHONY
so that is just another case where macs dont "just work"

daybringer

Here's a horror story for you.

Way back in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Seven, a relative of mine was running for public office in our local municipality. Fresh out of college, I volunteered to build the website for his political party and manage his contact database of roughly 30,000 constituents.

This was done on a 486 DX2/66 with 8MB of RAM, and two hard drives, 350MB and 500MB, respectively. I believe I was running Win95.

Anyway, this computer sat in the back room of said relative's house, and ran fine until the day I went to swap out a dead 14.4k modem for a new one. My critical mistake? I removed the dead part before having the new part on-hand to install. Hence, I left one of the expansion slots open. What could happen in 20 minutes?

When I got back from the store, I opened the chassis ... and mice had gotten into the computer. Of course, they did what mice often do in small, warm, enclosed spaces, and left lots of evidence of their passing.

I thought I was smart at the time, backing up the 350MB drive to the 500MB drive nightly. I figured that I'd have a backup in case of any eventuality.

Dead wrong. The mice hosed both drives, the motherboard, and the processor.

Of course, this was three days before my relative's scheduled cold-calling effort ... which relied entirely on the contact database on my dead hard drives.

Long story short (too late): three grand later, both drives made it through drive recovery with varying degrees of success. Most of the database was intact, and it helped him get elected. He's still in office today.

So the recovery was well worth the money ... but you'd better believe I'm running nightly backups with Mozy, and my desktops are running RAID controllers 'til the bitter effing end.

It_Figures

Like some above, I've had drives recovered for clients. I can't say it was worth every penny, nor was it a rip-off. Somewhere between, really.

For about $2K we got a few CDs that were important and a few dozen CDs that were a total waste of polycarbonate. I understand why we didn't have an option to recover just the important stuff (at the same cost per CD, of course) but getting that album of junk really messes up the value proposition.

darsal

@CityGuySailing: "but how long does it take to back up 2 Terrabytes to external?"

Not long, after your initial backup. Then just do incrementals.

holymogwai

I went to a data-recovery place once with a hard drive that was working intermittently. The place also did regular computer service. They managed to copy the data off the drive in the periods when it was working, for which they charged the regular computer service hourly rate, rather than the much higher data recovery fee.

winston

I have used OnTrack twice. Once, they opened the drive, saw the brown flakes of the hard drive surface, and closed it up. It was toast. Small diagnostic fee. The next time, drive was recovered perfectly except for some irrelevant files/programs. Cost a bunch, but worth every penny. Sure, it's OK to say "TAKE BACKUPS", but how long does it take to back up 2 Terrabytes to external? A week between backups is $$ thousands in development / processing fees. After each failure we modified our processes to back up more relevant files nightly.

CityGuySailing

@TPSreports: Recovery shops in India don't usually boast clean rooms to open up hard drives and replace defective parts. That's one high end recovery technique that's often employed. For example, if the drive motor fails, it gets replaced in a clean room, the drive works and you get a big ding on your credit card. Or if the platter bearings fail.

Ausoleil

How about an option for "No, i recovered it myself using free software"?

This actually just happened to me. Didn't properly eject a firewire drive and it lost its boot record or something so it doesn't show up as a partition. But all the data is still sitting on it.

Jeremiah

@Ausoleil: I'm going to try this trick, just so I can get some external harddrives to work long enough so I can wipe them before sending them off to be recycled.

theblackdog

Thankfully haven't had this experience since 94. But what a waste of money for nothing. In those days your backup was the paper copies of everything so we spent months entering data back into a PC. What made it worse was that it was a disgruntled employee who erased the hard drives.

Thank goodness for external HDs and DVD Roms. Backing up has never been easier or cheaper.

quail

We've used it a couple of times at the college I work at. Once was our fault (we reimaged a machine we shouldn't have), and once it was the end user's fault (he spilled a cup of coffee in his MacBook Pro, physically damaging the drive).

madanthony

Being in the IT world, we get a lot of people who come to us with sad faces and broken hard drives asking if there's anything we can do to get their data back.

If I like them, I won't ask the smartassed question, "do you have backups?" I already know the answer from the look on their face. No sense in making a friend feel worse.

There are two kinds of failures, one is a corrupt OS stack (not everyone uses Windows, surprise) and the other is a mechanical failure. Recovery from a corrupted OS is not so hard, but mechanical failure can be another matter entirely.

One thing that we see a lot are heads that are somehow stuck, and thus cannot read the drive. I fix about 3/4 of them temporarily by wrapping up the drive and putting it in a -40C cooling chamber for a couple of hours to chill it down. Then we warm it up and more often than not the drive works well enough to back up and then we replace them.

We did have a user that was out in the field and had a failure like this, and had to have a document off of the drive for an important meeting the next day. I sent him over to Kroger for some dry ice, Radio Shack for a couple of static bags and we chilled the drive off that way. Later that night, he got it to boot and got his stuff onto a USB drive. Meeting saved.

The important thing to remember is that a backup is like insurance on your car. Insurance feels like a waste of money when you pay the bill, but if you get into a car wreck you're glad you did. Some people decide to not pay at all and take their chances and feel really sorry if they get into an accident, but it is too late and it's too bad. Same thing for taking the take to create a duplicate of irreplaceable data.

Ausoleil

@holymogwai: hah! i like the sarcasm explanation, probably averted 10 or 20 "dude you're an idiot" comments.

rscotta

Several years ago, sent out a HD to several of the recovery services. Total cost for shipping + R&D into the drive was about $70, for them to tell me it was toast. Which was fine, just needed to know.

FYI, if you shake your hard drive, and it sounds like sand is inside of it, that's called a 'head crash' (the 'reader' thingy actually rubbed against the spinning data plattens, reducing the surface of them and the head to dust)-- it's beyond repair. Save yourself a few bucks and don't even bother.

savvy999

I use Raid1. Wait a minute, isnt that backup?

Please dont comment on how its not, we had that last week. I was joking.

holymogwai

I used a data recovery service, and they had two prices. One high price to look at the drive and try to get it going, and another, even higher price, in the event that they actually recover some data that you want.

I paid the initial fee to have the drive worked on, but they were never able to get anything off of it. So, I'm not sure which option to choose. Wasn't a rip-off, but wasn't worth every penny, either.

knave77

I've got a clunking hard drive sitting in my desk waiting for recovery prices to drop. Prices are still too vague and high. You'd think there would be tons of these shops in India by now.

TPSreports

@knave77: Same here. It was on my work PC, and my company does not pay for backup drives at all...so they suffer periodically. I have my own backup drive at home, but I'd be violating my company policy if I backed up my work PC there, so I don't (wink, wink).

TsuKata

Don't u think you r missing an option in the poll.

-No, Did it myself. :-)

LankanDude

I paid for harddrive recovery once, about three years ago. I stumbled on a local shop that could do the recovery. He charged me $275 which included the new Seagate 80GB HDD that he backed-up to. I was amazed at the low cost. I've received quotes from $2000 to $8000 for an 80GB drive!!! Now, I have three copies of my data in house (two computers, dynamically sync'd, and one drive sync'd weekly).

We also have a DVD back-up of the most important data in the safe-deposit box at the bank. We have 100's of thousands of digital photos. If we had something like a fire or tornado, all three running copies could be destroyed. The bank seemed like a safe alternative. It would take one hell of a storm to knock out my house and the bank.

In the event of that, most of our precious photos and documents have been uploaded to an online storage, so I guess that makes 5 copies of my MOST important data.

So, does that pass the test for data security???

dtaschler

I used a fixed price recovery company (can't remember the name off the top of my head right now, this was years go), for $ 495 on a laptop drive, paid the extra $ 100 bucks for a ghosted drive, and bought a new hard drive and sent it out with the broken clicking hard drive...2 weeks later, I had a new hard drive with all my data on it...it was worth it.

Now, I use Norton 360, which automatically backs up my drives at night, and I have an extra external that I keep in my car, updated about once a week or so.

Can't wait to get a 2 TB external with my tax check, hehe

DemolitionMan

Backups only work if they're automatic. Otherwise, they get done a few times then never again - until it's too late.

Hard drives fail. Whether they fail while you own the machine or after you've passed it on, it's a roll of the dice. In this day and age with financial data and heaps of digital family photos to lose, don't run a computer without backups. Backing up to another drive is good, but doesn't save you from fire or theft. Optimally, you want to back up files offsite.

Easy ways for the Common Joe to do it are:

If you have very few important files (a few documents and such) that don't change a lot, buy a USB thumb drive, copy the files to it and take it to a friend's house or work.

For those with a few more files, sign up for one of the free or low-cost online services that stores your data somewhere else: SkyDrive, Carbonite and Amazon's S3 Jungle Disk are great choices. I like them because the files are copied automatically offsite without any manual effort.

For geeks, consider a Windows Home Server for $500. (Yes, MSFT actually makes something that's user-friendly and gets great reviews). HP makes a great one: the 500GB EX470 or the 1GB EX475 for $200 more. Both have toolless drive trays to add extra hard drives of any type, brand or size. Backups for up to 10 machines in the house are automatic and carefree. It doesn't get the data offsite, but it's a great way to automatically backup everyone's data in the house - and you get a web server, media streamer and access to all your files from any web browser on the planet for free (oh yeah - and it's a great place to put unused hard drives).

Save yourself the heartache of losing heaps of irreplaceable digital memories and data. Go start backups today and make them automatic. Your geek friends will thank you.

dugn

Can we get a post about backing up and software solutions? Or just a link to an old one? I was using synk occasionally, but it gave my Intel Mac fits, actually causing it to crash a couple of times - during backing up. So what's the best cheap or free software out there for incremental backups? I confess, since my first HD failure and initial backup frenzy, I've been getting lazy again...

o3fingers

I used TweakUI to change the location of the "My Documents" and "Desktop" folders to a share on my Linux server.

That server has a second hard drive in it, and does a nightly rsync to back everything up. This setup kinda grew organically - if I ever rebuild the box, I'll put in a bigass RAID.

In the past, I've helped other people recover data by:

1. Blowing a box fan directly into the open PC case.

2. Replacing the circuit board on the dead drive with one from an identical working model.

3. Putting the drive in the freezer for a bit to cool it off.

4. Holding the drive in my hand with the spindle axis parallel to my wrist, and giving it quick sharp twist to un-stick the heads.

Pasketti

I just have to plug this company that I went through in Madison, WI called Gilware. They were able to recover my dead (and smoking) hard drive for $300 in 2 days. For an extra $1,300 they'll do it same-day. That is 1/4 the price of any other company I could find, and they have an actual office with a cleanroom and everything! The recovery went 100% - of course, I didn't have to pay for it, but I'm glad my customer was willing to spend the $300.

atomix

I do back-ups, but I also have a copy of Spin-Rite just in case something happens before my overnight back-up has run.

Adam Chernow

@TPSreports: I agree ...
I now have three hard drives that have failed over time, and each time I go to look at the prices, I'm sticker-shocked back into waiting.

Much as I would love some of this media (my entire Napster College MP3 Collection!), it's never been something so irreplaceable that's merited ~$1,000.

Until now.

Within a week of each other, my hard drive failed, AND my USB back-up of my entire collection of family photos quit working.

And not some software issue. The high-pitch-whine-wow-my-hard-drive-never-made-that-noise-before kind of issue. I've looked high & low for an affordable data recovery solution, and have yet to find one. If anyone has any tips, I would greatly appreciate them.

Honkycat

I have done this for alot of clients as well they never seem to listen to me whenever i tell them to backup their important files. Well $200 down the drain for them =[

wwilsonxp

Going along with AUSOLEIL, another type of mechanical hard drive failure can be caused by a bad PCB board. The PCB is the electrical board on a hard drive that sends and receives signals from the computer. The guts of your hard drive may be perfectly fine and consequently your data may be well intact and you just have some faulty electronics. While not conclusive, one way to determine if this might be your issue is to power up your computer and see if the drive spins or heats up or really does anything at all indicative of "working". If not, yours may be a candidate for a PCB repair. You can send it off to those companies and pay a fortune, or you may be able to fix it yourself...just maybe!

I cant personally vouch that it works, because I have only tried it once and my success was limited, but if you conclude that your PCB board is faulty, you may be able to get it going again by replacing the bad board with a new one from an identical drive.

I had a bad hard drive that would not spin or heat up at all. I wasnt going to pay for data recovery, so I decided an experimental fix couldnt hurt. Unfortunately my success was only limited because although I scoured ebay and sent lots of emails asking the seller for the specs of the drives they were selling, I never found an IDENTICAL drive. My drive was pretty old, but I was still able to find a drive that was the same model, same manufacturer, but it was from a different production run. I replaced the PCB board and plugged it in.
The result? My drive which originally wouldnt crank up at all now actually started spinning! That's where the story ends though and that's why I only claim limited success. I never could get my computer to read it. I can only assume that the variation in production runs led to enough of a variance that the connectors on the PCB board did not to line up just right with my drive and that is as far as I got.
Now I back up..of course, but I'll definitely try it again if I'm in the same position.

peoples31

@rossruns: Oops, it's $89, not $80. Still worth having a copy, in my opinion. I bought myself one and one for my parents - still no drive failures to date, but I still back up religiously, just in case I get one that hoses a drive beyond recovery.

rossruns

It's not a cure-all solution, but running SpinRite [www.grc.com] on your drives semi-regularly will help prevent some forms of drive failure (or at least give you warning of imminent failures). The same software will also recover some forms of drive failure.

At a reasonably-low $80 program, definitely worth considering before going for the more costly data recovery center option (assuming your drive is something that could possibly be restored using this sort of approach). Note: you must have an Intel-based PC to put the drive into in order to run the program.

rossruns

I used DriveSavers for recovery of a memorycard for a camera that was brought into the ocean while snorkeling but because of a faulty zip-n-seal camera bag, became submerged in water. The card had all the pictures from our vacation. When I contacted DriveSavers, the deal was if they can't recover, I didn't pay anything, but if they did recover the cost would be determined at that point. They did recover and charged me $200. We decided it was worth getting the pictures and paid the $200. Definitely worth it.

acekaye

Once. Action Front was expedient and fairly priced (as commercial data recover services go, anyway).

trygve

Used it where I work. A user had saved all their data to the hard drive rather than the server and I ghosted the system like we do every summer. We even tell them that over the summer, all the hard drives will be reghosted. Sent in and they recovered all the data.

merryworks

Man, just had this happen! Sent the HD to two seperate "recovery services" and neither could recover my data -- hardware failure. Then I sent it to the HD manufacturer (Seagate) and they were able to recover MOST of my data (mostly vacation and wedding pictures) for the princely sum of $1,620! Yikes. Actually still paying on this. Feels a lot like being raped, but it is my own damn fault. I now perform regular backups (once per week) with Mozy -- talk about closing the barn doors AFTER the horses have gotten out! But lesson learned.

Migrating to Mac at the end of this month and will be using Time Machine.

Hodo

My mac tower drive went once. I added a new drive and left the old one installed. About a week later, the crashed drive made came back for a visit, so I was able to copy everything over before it shut down again. Now, I use Mozy.

sharpeiboy

I've not personally used these services, however in my life as the 'last line of defense' for PCs in a large company I have had to utilize these services.

Mind you TOTAL hard drive failures are quite rare. I've seen the OS go belly up, motherboards die, memory smoke, etc. But these usually can be recovered by just remounting the drive onto another computer and moving the data.

However in the rare cases where drive failure has occurred, and data recovery is not possible then these services are invaluable. The only people who used them were the VPs and above, since the cost of a drive recovery is in the thousands depending on how bad the drive is. The recovery isn't perfect either. Usually you get a DVD full of random file names which you then have to figure out what they actually are. But for some people this is better than having to redo a top secret CAD drawing of some new product.

satoru

I've had a crash in May last year. It was a hardware failure. I thought about trying to get a data recovery service to try to recover my data but I thought it was just too expensive and the work I lost was in fact recoverable. I just had to extract it from my head again.

Another concern was privacy. Everybody here has probably heard of the GeekSquad techs who search for porn on the hard drives of their clients. I can't believe that the data recovery industry is exempt from that. No, I don't keep porn on my hard disk but there is other information that a third-party may be able to take advantage of. My sensitive information is kept secure but you never know how an OS may leak that information. And then there are more mundane things, like the emails I send to people. Someone may tell me something they don't want publicized so I don't want to run the risk of it being publicized. Or the information in my emails may be used to pull a phishing scam on someone I know. (I think I'm unlikely to be caught by phishing but some of my family members are not as savvy. A third party could use information on my hard disk to pass for me.) To me, letting someone take a look at my data is just as bad as letting a complete stranger rummage through my house. I don't think the risk of a damaging leak would be huge if I went with a data recovery company but that's a risk I just don't want to take. Just as I don't want to take the risk of leaving my house without locking the doors.

lemur

Unfortunately, I've made use of drive recovery services on 2 occasions...

First time, it was when I still had my own business and my hard drive conked out the day before I was finally going to take a 'real vacation' (ie, more than a day or two...) of 3 weeks for the first time in several years! Unfortunately, I didn't have a current backup somewhere, so was totally panicked as I needed to get some things done and out the door for my clients before I left town the next day...

Luckily, I guess, I'm not far from DriveSavers and called them and then overnited my HD to them...they said my data would be on a new HD in a FedEx box on my doorstep when I returned from my trip...sure enough, there was a box there when I got back...popped in HD and voila! was back in business, but about $1500 lighter in my wallet... ;-/

Learned my lesson (more or less..) and went out the next day and spent $1100 on a digital tape drive, that used those tiny micro tapes at about $40 a pop....

;-/

Unfortunately, got a bit lazy after shutting down my biz about 4 years ago and since then have been lax about backups...and in fact, tape drive (SCSI interface..) doesn't work with current MacBook....but do have DVD burner....

So, last year, one of the HD's in my ol' PMG4 crapped out, and again, realized that I didn't have recent enough backup file....so, shipped out HD to DriveSavers again....

;-/

Think I've finally learned my lesson.... ;-)

Moved my HD's from PMG4 into external enclosures, and backup MacBook (now my main machine...) to those HD's, so think I'm covered, more or less.... ;-)

While DriveSavers aren't cheap, they DO get the job done and on-time....

FWIW, the more time you can give them to do the recovery, the lower the fee is....

ArchiMark

Between 99 and 02 I had a string of bad luck with data loss, much of which could be attributed to IBM's Deathstar and cheap Maxtor drives. Now I mostly have problems with file system errors. I backup regularly and occasionally check the drive's SMART status. This combined with more reliable Seagate & WD drives of the past several years has worked well for me.

davebarboza

there should be an option for No. I couldn't afford it, but have retained the drive in hopes that someday I may be able to or the prices will come down!

n/a

Friend of mine had a half terabyte WD MyBook external die on him after about a month or two of use. WD quoted him about $1500 to recover the data,or he could send it back under warranty and lose the data. The enclosure wouldn't light up at all so instead of sending it back we took apart the enclosure, got the SATA drive inside out, and hooked it up to my desktop (pictures of the insides here: [shmoosrazor.blogspot.com] ) All the data was still there, and he's now happily running it in a new enclosure he bought.

Not the right solution in all cases, but for those with dead externals, it might just be the enclosure!

Shmoo

I have recovered a disk myself as it was about to give up the ghost. This involved a linux live-CD, the drive in a freezer for 48 hours, and then a complete covering in ice-pops whilst retrieving the data. I was amazed!

robertblay

I've paid twice.

1.
I had a Maxtor hard drive develop a "bad block" right after I had ripped all of my vinyl to it (many of you may know how time consuming it is to copy an album; I think it's almost worth buying the CD re-issue!). Windows wouldn't touch it.
I downloaded File Scavenger ([www.quetek.com]) for Windows. It found nearly all of the files and their directory entries. I gladly paid the shareware price to do the actual recovery.

2.
I paid to have files recovered from our camera's SD card after I accidentally erased the card containing all the photos of one of our too-seldom visits to the son in Seattle. I might have downloaded a tool or tools to try to do it myself, but some wifely urging dictated the expedient method.

TimHare

theres two types of data loss. general loss of tables and file indexes, partition deletes, etc. and then theres mechanical hardware (drive) failure. with mechanical failure, theres usually not a lot you can do (try putting it in the freezer) but with accidental deletes, partition wipes, etc, you can generally recover it simply using GetDataBack. i use it to do data recovery for friends/family/clients and it works wonders, even finding old long-deleted files that hadnt been overwritten and still existed... i recommend it for anyone

elislider

@It_Figures: That's just your karma getting back at you for getting involved in politics.

faust1200

I just recently lost a hard drive while trying to merge two partitions using Partition Magic. Knoppix doesn't even recognize the drive. I don't perform routine backups but I did backup the drive a few months back.

I'm considering using a service to fish out some home movies that I just created but since I still have the mini-dv tapes I can just rip them again.

hxp

@PEOPLES31 The secret is in making sure that you get a PCB and/or hard drive with the correct firmware. I can attest that this DOES work, just dug myself out of the doghouse by replacing the PCB on a hdd after an upgrade gone wrong. Just check for the correct firmware and all should be okay. The drive I bought off of eBay was made about 6 months EARLIER than my original drive, but, the firmware was as close as I could get.

I just replaced the PCB on my Maxtor 120GB hdd, said a little prayer, and voila... all data was recovered. The REALLY cool thing about it was that I'm actually using the "new" eBay drive in my home Linux server now. The original drive now lives in an anti-static bag in the closet (just in case). The PCB is now hanging on a bulletin board as a "gentle" reminder to always backup! ;-)

gdunc

I keep hearing about "SpinRite" a couple of times a year (for the last few years) and have yet to actually hear a thorough technical analysis on how it works, even after much nosing around on grc.com and Google. So far, in my book, it's snake oil. I absolutely refuse to pay for a program that is touted to have "magical" abilities, but sold to you as a "black box".

Can anyone provide some information on how it does what it does?

I've also been thinking about how to ensure the safety of my data when I build my next PC. My best option so far is to use a motherboard with built-in RAID 5 support, and set up an array using that, in conjunction with Tom's Hardware's hard disk refence charts, sorted by price per gigabyte, and NewEgg.

SweetBearCub

I have to second Gilware- Here's what the process is like:
1) Call, create an order, etc. Part of the process is creating a list of "dealbreaker" data: file & folders which you need, and the entire point of sending the drive in for recovery is to get stuff out.
2) Send them your hard drive, plus a working (blank) hard drive to put all the recovered data on.
3) If it's not salvagable, they ship it back. Your total non-refundable deposit: $20 shipping (as opposed to a few hundred if you go through Data Doctors or some other data recovery service)
4) They perform the service, and send you a list of all files that were recovered on your hard drive. Then they call you, and over the phone, manually open and check the "dealbreaker" files to make sure that they aren't garbage data. Even after they've done the work, if the stuff you need wasn't recovered, you can just opt to have them send the broken drive back to you. Again, you only ever had to pay for shipping.
Otherwise, they ship you the drive with the recovered data on it, and charge you. If you want, you can call back and ask them to ship you the busted drive (in case, for instance, it's a busted dell drive, which you need in order to get the free replacement offered under your warrantee.)

The better solution, of course, is to always back up your own stuff. But that's a lesson a lot of people (myself included) have to learn the hard way. If your drive fries and you have to send it in for recovery, I highly recommend going through Gilware. It's the only recovery service I've found whose pricing model doesn't depend on the client being in a totally panicked state of mind.

callingshotgun

Many years ago I worked for a small business whose owner was a really nice guy, but totally disorganized. And because he was chronically late billing his customers, he never had much money, and that's why when he went to buy a tape-backup drive he got one way smaller than what he needed to back up the system (which included the customer database, his accounting software, the POS system we used behind the counter, and so forth).

He also didn't understand that his backup software could be told just to back up certain directories, not the whole flippin' content of the drive. And to do incremental backups.

Result, he was usually "too busy" or "too tired" to hang around for hours to switch tapes in the middle of a backup. Oh, and he only owned two tapes (too expensive to buy more).

Enter the Michelangelo virus, which his doofus brother introduced to the system with a floppy disk. I did my best and did manage to get rid of it, but the data on the drive was already scrambled by the time I got there, because the two doofus brothers had been trying to "fix" the computer themselves.

Most recent backup tape? Six months back. We draw a curtain over what happened next.

Years later I was one of the support people in the public computer area in a public library. Patron comes up screaming bloody murder because the computer he was using "messed up" his floppy disk. I took it to the computer behind the counter and you betcha, it was messed up. And apparently it contained his only copy of a bunch of documents he was preparing for a lawsuit. It took me about five minutes to get him to shut up and listen to one simple question: Did you pop this disk out of the drive while the red light on the drive was still on? Of course he had. Save file, punch button, eject disk, right? No need to wait for the drive to oh, actually do its work.

I got the IS guys downstairs to recover the disk with Norton, but the idiot surely didn't deserve it.

infmom

God. Totally comment-spamming here (edit buttons! need edit buttons!), but I keep thinking of these things.

Before you take/send a drive to a 'real' data recovery place, try taking it to a local PC *repair* shop. They'll frequently be able to handle non-hardware-failure data recovery at a much more affordable price. Some of them will even do very small jobs (128mb SD-cards, etc) for free. (Save someone's memories without reaming them, you have a customer for life.)

RvLeshrac

@lemur:

Real data recovery services typically pride themselves on confidentiality. Keep in mind that these companies most often perform data recovery on very sensitive corporate information (trade secrets/etc). If you're concerned, most of them are more than willing to sign a confidentiality agreement.

RvLeshrac

Oh, I should also note that if you have a (Sony-branded) MemoryStick with accidentally deleted data, Sony has a recovery tool available (for free, if you can read the tiny serial number on your MS), available from their support. The tool will work on other flash as well. Since they're always formatted FAT(16/32), you'll have to do some renaming, but it will get everything off with no problems.

RvLeshrac

@hxp:

See my above notes, and use TestDisk to recover the old partition. Very likely, the situation will just require a (long) fsck to clean up after TestDisk restores the original partition table (assuming it can find the original partition table).

RvLeshrac

@Shmoo:

"Might" should really be "nearly always, barring funny noises."

Fortunately, any reputable drive vendor recognizes that the enclosures fail more often than the drives, and will honor the warranty (if you call them first to tell them that you need to crack the enclosure to try and get the data from the drive).

RvLeshrac

@SweetBearCub:

Spinrite is a useless piece of software. It does near-nothing with the drive. It *MIGHT* (emphasis) be able to save you from the horrors of one or two bad sectors, but that's it. Even then, you're better off with a chkdsk /r, since spinrite (stupidly) doesn't mark the sectors as bad and programs continue to use the damaged areas.

You're better off spending the same money for GetDataBack from Runtime Software. $70 for the FAT version, and $80 for the NTFS version.
( [www.runtime.org] )

They also produce some RAID recovery tools, which save asses often given dead RAID controllers, hosed stripes, etc. ($100 + possibly $90 if you don't have the original RAID parameters, + possibly [if you're REALLY in trouble] $300 for a remote examination of your RAID parameters, free if they can't help you).

-------------------

I must say, I've done quite a few bits of data recovery over time.

What gets me is NOT the hardware-failure pricing. Clean rooms are horribly expensive to build and operate, with ventilation systems that eat huge amounts of power. High-end data recovery hardware, such as devices that read and reconstruct platters directly, are also insanely expensive.

What gets me is the fact that most of these places will charge the same ridiculous sums of money to do no more than, say, run TestDisk on a drive to recover a lost partition.

If you want a nice data recovery toolkit, you need:

1) TestDisk.
2) UBCD4Win.
3) The 'big' suite of tools from Runtime Soft.
4) IDE/SATA-to-USB adapter(s).
5) A USB-A extension cable with steady hands (for misbehaving jumpdrives with loose USB connectors).

And that's it. Anything that these tools can't help you recover will require either esoteric, magickal techniques (sacrificing goats, freezing drives) or clean-room data recovery. You can add some cloning software or drive copying software of your choice, but you're usually better off just pulling specific bits of data off, since that will do less (further) damage to the drive than simply reading the whole thing.

Nothing else in any technical/repair field compares to the feeling you get when you manage to recover someone's pictures of their dead father/mother/spouse/child/sibling's last birthday/holiday/etc. People don't cry and hug you when you replace their power supply or put on a new timing belt.

RvLeshrac

This poll is also missing an option for "No, because of the exorbitant costs." As others have already indicated, there are plenty of people who have old, dead drives sitting around waiting for the cost of data recovery to come down.

For software based recovery in a Windows environment, I will second/third/fourth the recommendation for GetDataBack. There are a plethora of data recovery utilities available nowadays, including a few, free ones, but I've always had the best results using RunTime's products. The only time I ever attempted data recovery on a Mac based drive, the outcome was successful using Data Rescue II.

When a true hardware failure hits and something along the lines of a clean room is needed, DriveSavers are definitely one of the most professional and reliable outfits in the business. The cost of their services, though, is obviously going to be a major roadblock for some.

From an economic standpoint, with the cost of hard drives being so low nowadays, you should really be aiming to avoid ever having to deal with a data recovery company. For far less than half of what most dependable recovery companies will charge you to salvage a 500GB drive, you could do the following:

1. Buy 3 500GB drives and a mobile rack or external enclosure

2. Put 2 of the drives into a RAID1 configuration to protect yourself against hardware failure

3. Split the setup into 2 partitions

4. Create a solid backup solution that fits your needs (i.e. daily, weekly, daily and weekly, incremental, differential, etc) to backup important data on partition 1 to partition 2 and vice versa

5. Every month, or on whatever schedule you are comfortable with, clone your RAID1 drives over to drive 3, which is in the rack or enclosure, and store drive 3 off-site. This way, you are also covered in the case of theft, fire, flood, Xenu, or some other disaster.

j3sX

@RvLeshrac: Well, I can't see how a data recovery company would stay in business if they did anything else than guarantee total confidentiality. So they will all say that they guarantee confidentiality. And yet... I don't trust them. It does not mean I would never under any circumstances use their services but it would depend on 3 factors:

1. how much does the recovery cost?
2. how much does the data loss cost me if there is no recovery?
3. how much would it cost me if the data was leaked?

lemur

Whatever you do don't fall for the old freezer or 'tap the drive lightly with a hammer' kind of crap you see old wives tales for. All you are going to accomplish is getting condensation on the electronics or scratch up your data. If you ever do lose a drive (or have a client lose a drive that they weren't backing up for some reason) I find getdataback a decent tool as long as the drive isn't ticking. If it makes weird noises/hangs or whatever turn it off immediately though. If you find yourself in need of professional recovery, I'd have to plug Gillware or Ontrack. My company has used both extensively with positive results most of the time.

amfam

I'd have to agree with the comments regarding cost v/ benefits of having the recovery done. I had an issue with the hard drive on my laptop last spring (we'll call it 'blunt force trauma') and unfortunately, I hadn't done a proper back up of my financial data. I knew I needed that data for business and tax purposes and the loss of that data was far more catastrophic for me than the cost of recovery.

It was an expensive lesson and since then all of my data is now backed up across time and space using a combination of external hard drives, online services and CDRs so that in the event that I have an issue like this again, I won't have to pay such a large recovery fee.

kiikay

Personally I think there are just a few options when a drive goes bad. If the data is in the "nice to have, I guess" category, then try to run some software tools on it or monkey about with drive freezing etc.

If it is in the "company going belly up without it" category then just find the most professional recovery place you can find like Ibas or some such with clean room capacity and pay. Places like that can recover data even if someone drives a nail through the drive itself, literally.

Never had to use a recovery service like that myself, but one never knows I guess... backups are pretty crucial these days.

cr0ft

I had an SD card loaded with photos from a corporate event. For reasons passing understanding, the card became unreadable, both by the camera and by myriad card readers and other devices that tried to access it.

I sent it to DriveSavers and inside of four days they had the entire contents of the card extracted. It cost us a bit of coin, but it was well worth it. Those guys know their business.

Danilo Campos

I'm a network administrator and we have a couple of file servers. Before my time they had a meltdown that required commercial backup. It was astronomically expensive. That price would never leave my wallet for my documents. I would rather recreate them all. Of course that said I do backup everything now. Multiple copies and the like. Highly recommended.

mrosedal

For those of you still waiting for the cost of data recovery coming down - wake up and smell the coffee and choose to either forget the data or if you need it recover it now.

First of all, magnetic media deteriorates as it ages, so if it wasn't bad to begin with, it's probably getting there now.

Secondly, the cost of data recovery is high because of work cost and the cost of maintaking expensive things like clean rooms. Sure, there may be some "let's charge high cause we have them over a barrel" going on, but it will never become cheap.

Just because hard drive manufacturers keep droppping the prices of the hardware in order to stave off the inevitable move from ancient mechanical rotating platters to a more sane way of storing data in this millennium doesn't mean that pricing on stuff like data recovery will follow. In fact, cost for things that require direct human attention and judgement may well go up as we continue to do more and more with automation, for all we know.

cr0ft

well if it was a choice between the cost of recovery and the pictures/stuff on the computer...the data is priceless

Arsenal6

I have a fried hard drive sitting carefully boxed in my basement, waiting for me to decide whether or not I want to pay several hundred dollars to recover about 12 medium-importance documents (stuff that I can live without, but really wish I had back).

onesix18

@onesix18: see above post.

AlanIn4D

@Honkycat: When my drive failed I called up driversavers and balked at their prices (even student prices). Because my harddrive wouldn't even start up when it got plugged in, my guess was that it was hard drive circuit board just burned out or something. So I went online and was able to find a replacement board for around 85-125 dollars, which did the trick. The hard drive hung and struggled a lot while it copied all the data over to an actual bootable drive, but nonetheless it saved all my data.

AlanIn4D

For those who are waiting "for the cost to come down...", realize that it's not going to. It is what it is for professional recovery. You'd be much better served to save for the recovery instead - $50 or $100 a month is not that much if the data is worth it. DriveSavers is the best in the business, and from what I know they have a no data, no charge type of thing going.

from here forward, BACK UP!

MrLimo

I somehow damaged my backup drive - It's an external hard drive - I will be uploading all my files to MediaMax now as well.

Yep I'm a genius. Hey, that's what I have you guys/girls for - Seriously you have all been some major lifesavers once or twice since learning of your existence a while back.

-Christine
[afflictedwithrsd.com]

jesdenm