What you need to know about Hard drive data recovery businesses

When you think of data recovery the first thing that may come to mind if you’ve heard the rumors, is that it costs thousands and thousands of dollars, or if you haven’t you do a quick Google search of a local computer shop that claims to get your data back for $50. In both cases you are wrong.
Scams: Companies that offer data recovery for $100 are only running software and if your drive is failing this can damage it further or ruin all chances at recovery. I’ve received many drives from clients that have taken their drives to other companies only to have them destroyed totally. Drives that have been opened outside of a cleanroom causes platter damage and corruption.
A drive must never be opened outside of a clean room environment. Dust, pollen, bacteria, and human debris will damage the sensitive magnetic media that could result in head crashes and more unreadable bad sectors.
Most companies that offer cleanroom recovery are also outsourcing your drive to another company and tacking on a huge commission fee. This may feel like a violation in the sense that you are unaware of who exactly is seeing your sensitive information. Most computer shops try and do a recovery from the known bad drive. This can potentially destroy the drive and any chances at recovering the data.
Advertising an unusually high success rate on all drives is impossible to do because each situation is different and several factors come into play like what may be wrong with it, and has it been tampered with.

Important questions to ask a professional would be:
Is it possible to see the clean room for yourself? Ask if they personally do the recovery on site. Do they have any training and where? Ask if the price includes a new hard drive with the recovered data on it.

A common myth that people use is freezing the drive: On occasion, freezing the drive does work, however, I do not recommend
this most of the time. The condensation caused by changes in temperature
can cause a lot more damage.
The recovery Process is very straightforward and the process can take up to a month on severely damaged drives:


1.Diagnose and Repair the drive(clean room repair)
2.Image the repaired drive onto a known good drive reading as many bad sectors as possible.
3.Recover the data.


A normal price for clean room recovery on a damaged hard drive is between $800-to over $2000

Common cases
Dropped the drive. Causes bent or bad heads and may cause platter damage. Clean room work is almost always needed when this happens.
The drive causes the computer to blue screen.
This can be because the drive is starting to fail and bad sectors are starting to develop.

Don Anderson
www.southjerseydata.com
Certified Data Recovery Expert
Tri-State Data Recovery & Forensics LLC