If your hard drive crashed tomorrow, your house burned down, or someone stole your computer, what would happen to your photos, documents, and other digital data? Having had my own brush with this recently, I took a fresh look at my own safeguards and the steps you can take to protect your own data in different scenarios.
Data Recovery, Round 1 left my drive on it’s way to ESS Data Recovery with “symptoms of a severe head crash” that were beyond the capabilities of Aero Data Recovery. ESS turned around an initial evaluation within a few days:
Recovery Chance: Good (70-84%)
Medium Failure Details:
Disk Head Failure
Rotational Scoring Present (moderate)
Evaluated Cost: $995.00 - 10% = $895.50
For all the computers and crashes I’ve been through, I’ve never lost anything I couldn’t bear to loose, but a few days after my MacBook’s hard drive failed, I decided I really wanted my lost photos from Colorado. A few days before, someone in my delicious network bookmarked a data recovery site, and it turned out he had already found the best deal.
So I opened a case with Aero Data Recovery and shipped them both the dead drive and a new external USB-powered drive for the recovered data. Traditionally, data recovery has cost thousands of dollars and only been affordable to businesses with very valuable data. Now companies seem to be filling their downtime with $279 flat-rate, free-estimate jobs for consumers willing to bite the bullet.
About a week after the drive arrived, I got an email that the it “exhibits symptoms of a severe head crash”. That was beyond their capabilities, but they recommended two other companies that could continue the investigation once the drive was direct shipped. The prognosis is still hopeful, though I have no idea what this next tier will cost after the free estimate - I shudder to think what it would cost to have somebody with an electron microscope transcribe the 1s and 0s that make up my photos of Rocky Mountain…
Continue to Data Recovery, Round 2
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