A Rare Endorsement: When the Disk Drive Fails
http://lauren.vortex.com/2016/06/a-rare-endorsement-when-the-disk-drive-fails
As a matter of policy, I almost never make commercial endorsements.
But I'm making an extremely rare exception today, because I feel that
this particular firm may be able to save a whole lot of people a whole
lot of grief.
Recently, I was called upon to help deal with a disk failure situation
that rapidly appeared to be fairly hopeless. The disk in question was
in a laptop (Linux ext3 format filesystem), and it had failed suddenly
and hard -- very hard. None of my usual tricks could revive it.
There were some backups, but all the ones less than a year old turned
out to be largely useless due to corruption (I have a few choice words
to say about "tar" that I'll save for another day).
I found myself researching disk recovery firms -- an area that I had
never had occasion to examine in depth before. I quickly discovered
that this category of business is replete with come-ons and abusive
gimmicks.
For example, the promoted prices you see for most recovery firms
typically bear no resemblance to reality except in the simplest of
cases (e.g., when it's just a matter of using software to undelete
"deleted" files from a FAT32 disk).
But if the drive has actually suffered hardware damage (e.g. to the
circuitry or platters) the price will typically skyrocket
astronomically.
I also quickly discovered that most of the firms claiming they had
"local" offices in big cities actually could only do those
software-level operations there. Any hardware issues meant them
shipping the drives to some central lab -- meaning more delays.
In the midst of this rather gloomy research I stumbled across a firm
called $300 Data Recovery ( http://www.300dollardatarecovery.com ).
Now if you're like me, you're a bit wary of firms that promote a price
in their name. Hell, think of the expensive rebranding if your prices
go up! But I was intrigued by their pricing chart, and by the fact
that they were local to me here in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, just a
20 minute or so shot straight down the 101. I like dealing with local
firms when I can, since that means I can show up in person "to chat"
if something goes wrong.
It's a very small firm in a rather strange location for such an
operation. There are just a handful of employees --various of my
routine email communications were directly with the owner. It's on the
second floor of a strip mall on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City,
surrounded by typical strip mall businesses about as logically far
away from data recovery as you can imagine.
Yet they apparently do all their work in-house right there, including
in their own clean room when necessary. When I took the bad disk over
there, I was amused by their collection of horrifically failed open
disk drives in the waiting area.
You can read the details of their pricing structure on their site, but
the bottom line is that for most common situations, for a single disk
already removed from a computer, they charge a flat $300 (for up to
2TB disks) if they can recover the data, otherwise -- nothing. If
there's limited partial recovery, you can choose whether or not you
want to pay that fee for what they recovered, based on a comprehensive
list of recovered files that they email you. If you want priority
service to go to the head of the queue and have them start working on
a disk immediately, there's a nonrefundable $50 up front, and an
additional $150 if you accept the recovered data. So, in that case,
the total is $500 -- still a serious bargain. This doesn't include
shipping or the cost of a transfer drive -- both quite reasonable and
in my case avoided since I drove out to them and provided my own
transfer drive for the recovered data.
They also handle larger disks and RAID arrays for additional (but
still utterly reasonable) fees. And they happily execute data recovery
nondisclosure agreements. By the way, they can target particular files
for recovery by name if you wish, and can put crucial recovered files
online in a secure location if you need to download them immediately.
In many cases they apparently can recover data in a day or two once
starting work on a given disk. The disk I took them had to run in the
"cloning" stage for more like five days to recover the maximum amount
of data from crash-damaged platters, then another day or so for
filesystem reconstruction. They keep you informed by email all through
this process and respond virtually immediately to queries.
In the case of this particular disk, they ultimately recovered more
than 99% (99.38% notes Mr. Spock) of the data! This doesn't mean you
get 99.38% of all the files back perfectly intact of course -- since
that remaining 0.62% can be scattered across the filesystem in various
ways. They return the data in several different formats -- recovered
filesystem section with full hierarchy data, orphaned files without
names and/or directories, and so on. "Grep" is very useful to locate
specific files in those latter cases, of course, though the key files
I was tasked to find were quickly located in the filesystem recovery
section with their directory structures intact.
In fact, all important files (including some crucial databases) were
recovered from that disk, nearly all 100% complete.
I'd call that a success by any measure.
I'll add in passing that there seem to be some haters of this company
out there, including somebody who bothered to build a whole site
dedicated to trashing them -- claiming they're incompetent, that they
pay people to give them good reviews, and other rants. I don't know
what the authors of that site are going on about -- I can only speak
to my own experience. When I got the recovered data back, it was noted
that a positive review would be appreciated, but I certainly wasn't
offered any money or other compensation for one -- nor would I have
accepted such in any case. Nobody paid me nuttin' for this blog
posting!
As for their competency, I handed them a trashed, useless disk drive,
they handed me back a disk loaded with important recovered data that
was needed to fulfill an important mission -- and at a completely
reasonable price. That's good enough for me! I know I would take any
disk drive of mine to them in similar situations.
So if you're ever in a tough spot with a failed disk, you might very
well want to check these guys out -- again, that's $300 Data Recovery
( http://www.300dollardatarecovery.com ).
When I was getting ready to leave their shop with the recovered data
disk, I mentioned to them that I appreciated all their great work and
would enthusiastically recommend them -- but frankly, I hoped to never
have to deal with them myself again in a professional capacity!
It was clear from their smile that they knew exactly what I meant.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently
doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.
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