Hey Guys,

It looks like my hard drive just got fried. I lost about 3 years worth of transactions from my business. Why didn't I back them up? stupidity...... Anyways, I gave it to a few smart asses here at work and it looks like they cannot recover the data or read the drive, same issues i had when i tried.
Has anyone ever used a data recovery place??? what was the cost and did it work???

I am desperate, does any one else have any other suggestions?

thanks

 

If you didn't turn off the computer right after you lost it, you have little odds of recovery.

 

actually the likelyhood of you recovering your data is very good, depending on how much you want to spend. it can get pretty pricey taking it to a professional though,. These people actually disassemble the hard rive, and read the platters on their equipment...how much was this data worth to you?

 

If the hard drive itself is bad, you can send it away to a data recovery specialist which may cost up to 25k to get the data back, if they can even recover it. If the hard drive internals (platters) are fine then it will be a simple recovery. If the platters are bad then your likely to have problems that can cost more.

For future reference backup everything nightly to 2-3 different pieces of media, dvd, backup tape, 2nd hard drive, external hard drive, or zip disk. Make sure you test the restore capabilities of the data your backing up. I knew a company who thought they were backing up all their SQL data for 2 months, come to find out they had nothing but they rebuilt everything, too bad the guy didn't lose his job. Make sure the backups are away from the PC, if the PC burns up or something or if the house falls into a sink hole and you don't have access to the media is useless, once again.

If you can justify the cost mirror the data on your disks, or setup a raid 5 setup, raid 1 + 0 is the best, but your talking at least 4 disks for that.

I have never used a data recovery company, but I have never heard bad things about them, except the price.