We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.
I’m just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.
One specific question I have pertains to what’s recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We’re only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there’s tons of OS and other files we don’t want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?
They definitely charge more than $100, data recovery is one of the most expensive services at Best Buy. Level 1 data recovery, depending on the staff there they may try and perform that in house but level 2 always needs to be shipped out to a clean room and will easily push $1,000+. Also, the reality of data recovery is unless the data being recovered is highly important, it’s almost never worth it. During file recovery, file structure and naming gets destroyed so the results are hundreds of folders with nonsense names filled with hundreds of files with nonsense names and sometimes even missing an extension type, it’s a total mess with no guarantee that the data you need was actually recovered.
So, what service have they been doing for me (genuine)? It has been some time (since now I have a backup of important stuff to not need recovery), but I took a laptop in for cooked hard drive and got a thumb drive back with what looked like they were able to copy everything from the top level folder. Opening the thumb drive brought me to what most people see at the top level - a bunch of folders named My Documents, My Pictures, My Computer, etc Obviously stuff was missing from the crash, but they got a bunch of stuff from a fried laptop.
The drive was probably not physically damaged, so they could still recover some data from software
Yeah if there is no physical damage then it’s a level 1 recovery which tends to have better results. A “cooked” drive doesn’t explain anything about the failure type but I have worked in computer repair for a number of years and it was very common for people to believe their HDD was fried when in fact it was not, sometimes misbehaving software can behave very similarly to a failing HDD. In those cases it’s very simple to do a full data backup off the drive with folder structure still intact, coming from someone who’s been behind the counter at BestBuy, they probably just did a regular data backup (while charging you for a recovery) if your data was still perfectly intact. They love to sell their data recovery service because it’s expensive as hell and techs are actually told not to spend time on renaming and restructuring the data so the techs literally just run some freeware, walk away from your PC and then just hand you a USB (that you also pay for separately) with whatever results got spat out when it’s done. Don’t let them fool you though, Level 1 recovery pretty much anyone can do with some freeware (plenty of good options out there) and spare time. If the drive failed from too many bad sectors and you caught it early then yeah level 1 recovery is still possible but you may still experience some file structure corruption depending on how early you caught it. It becomes a game of luck depending on where the bad sectors exist and how many there are.
If your drive is experiencing mechanical failure, and it’s bad enough, you can hear it very clearly if you put your ear near the drive while it’s spinning. If you hear a grinding and/or clicking noise that’s usually a pretty solid indicator the the drive is experiencing mechanical failure and a level 2 recovery will be necessary which usually requires a clean room and some very specialized knowledge and tools.
Also, I should mention, this only applies to mechanical hard disk drives, solid state memory is a completely different beast and data recovery is oftentimes impossible on these types of drives.