A technician at THE COMPUTER REPAIR SHOP I need to pay $1000 to get this data recovered and it has to be opened in a clean room?
Some data recovery jobs do require a clean room but most do not. Clean room recovery is only required when there is physical damage to the drive (crashed heads, mis-aligned platters, etc) and the seals on the drive must be opened to repair it. Many data recovery providers charge the “clean room” price regardless of whether a clean room is actually needed. While he might be a nice person, the guy (or gal) working at your local computer repair shop isn’t trained or qualified to do data recovery. Often times, they are just trying to get a commission by sending you somewhere else. Data recovery is one of our specialties, so we’re the real deal.
What about putting my hard drive in the freezer? Doesn’t that work?
Putting your drive in a freezer will permanently damage your drive because condensation will build up. Don’t do it. It also means a clean room will be required for your recovery, turning a $195 recovery into a $1000 recovery somewhere else.
The guy at the computer shop said the drive is dead and unrecoverable, is that true?
We can’t say until we’ve had a chance to diagnose it. Most computer repair shops don’t have the equipment or the experience to diagnose hard drives for data recovery purposes. We’ve brought many drives back to life which were brought in as “dead”.
Can I recover the data from the drive myself using software tools?
Yes, but it comes with risks. Unless you have configured write-blocking software and hardware, when you connect your drive to your computer or when you leave your phone running, it will inevitably change some of the data on the drive, making recovery less likely. If the drive has physical damage, it can also increase that damage and destroy data. Before working on any recovery process, we make an image of the device so that we have a working copy instead of risking using a live drive. That being said, yes, you can recover it yourself if you’re willing to take some risk. If it’s worth paying $195 for, then leave it to a professional.
What if I accidentally formatted my drive? Deleted a file I didn’t mean to?
Chances are very high that the data can be recovered. Deleted files aren’t actually deleted, it’s just that the pointers to those files got deleted. Imagine somebody ripped the covers off all the books so you couldn’t find the one you wanted on the bookshelf. If you slowly went through every book on that bookshelf, you would eventually find the one you were looking for.
What if my data is on an SD card/flash drive/zip drive/something else?
We can recover data from ALL types of data storage devices so no worries.
Can you recover data from RAID arrays?
Absolutely, we can recover data from all RAID array types including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID 1+0, and RAID 0+1. For all RAID arrays except RAID1, it costs $195/drive. For RAID1 pricing, both drives are treated as one.