If you lose a file on your computer then the action you usually take is to go to your recycle bin and get it back. Easy. But what happens if you’ve deleted the file from there too? Situations like this often require companies that are specialists in retrieving files and folders from your computer. These specialists are known as data recovery companies and they handle every type of file lose – from deleted files right through to recovering the data from hard drives that have been smashed and been involved in fires.
I was recently fortunate enough to spend the day at Datlabs (http://www.datlabs.co.uk/), a prestigious data recovery and hard drive specialist based in England. Here’s a typical enquiry that they receive:
Hi, was wondering if you can give me some advice. I have a seagate external HDD (4TB, exFAT formatted) that I use on both windows and OS X operating systems. It has stopped working. I dropped it yesterday (it was not plugged in at the time and only fell about 10cm, but that could still be enough to damage it) and initially my macbook pro was able to recognise and read from it, but I ejected it and since then have not been able to get the Mac to see the drive. I have tried a windows machine at work, which installed the drivers automatically when the drive was connected, but the partition does not appear under my computer. Disk management under windows 7 can see the drive but it has no drive letter assigned and the only option that is not greyed out is to initialise the drive. I don’t want to format or initialise as the data is important to me (it is mostly backed up, but I have substantially reorganised the photos and music on the drive, and therefore would prefer to try and recover it). I have had similar problems with another drive in the past, however, my concern is that it is a mechanical issue, as the drive powers up, spins up and then stops.
What do you charge for assessment and data recovery and what kind of time frame does it normally take?
Spending the afternoon in the Datlabs lab I was able to see for myself how they recover data and how they fault find on hard drives. A drive that powers up and then powers down without being recognised is a dead ringer for a mechanical type failure, and mechanical failures are the worst type of hard drive fault because this usually means that the hard drive has sustained some physical damage that is preventing the hard drive working properly. It’s usually necessary to fix this fault (often by replacing parts) to get the drive working again and getting access to the data.
datarecovery7383 