HDD data recovery in UK?

[Sharky II]

Hi,

I have a friend who's given me an old 2.5" HDD from 2010, from a MacBook Pro

It has lots of precious files on there, apparently, but it takes ages to mount and is clearly damaged. Disk drill says there are 254 unreadable sectors... everything is so slow.

Does anyone know/can recommend a person/company/service that the drive can be sent to for (attempted) data recovery?

Thanks!

Ed

 

[eyoungren]

Hi,

I have a friend who's given me an old 2.5" HDD from 2010, from a MacBook Pro

It has lots of precious files on there, apparently, but it takes ages to mount and is clearly damaged. Disk drill says there are 254 unreadable sectors... everything is so slow.

Does anyone know/can recommend a person/company/service that the drive can be sent to for (attempted) data recovery?

Thanks!

Ed

There's Data Rescue 6. That's an app, but I don't know of any services in the UK. There are probably quite a few, I just don't know any (I'm in the US).

 

[MarkC426]

It may be worth trying Data Rescue 6 as suggested by @eyoungren first.
From what I have read in other posts, I think it is very expensive for data recovery services, so unless it's business related data which is invaluable, I would try yourself first.

Maybe of use:

https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/cost-guides/data-recovery-cost/

 

[eyoungren]

It may be worth trying Data Rescue 6 as suggested by @eyoungren first.
From what I have read in other posts, I think it is very expensive for data recovery services, so unless it's business related data which is invaluable, I would try yourself first.

Yes, absolutely, recovery services can be very expensive - particularly forensic recovery. We're talking in the thousands of dollars (in the US).

 

[Sharky II]

Hi folks. Currently managing to run Disk Drill. It's a 500GB drive so it will take a very long time (it's already been running a couple of hours). I wasn't aware of Data Rescue 6, I'll give it a go if this fails!

I'm very surprised that the drive hasn't ejected itself or caused the system to kernel panic, as has happened in the past...

My friend is prepared to pay for the recovery, but I don't really have an idea how much it will be - £100 or £1000?

Thanks for all the replies so far!

 

[velocityg4]

Hi folks. Currently managing to run Disk Drill. It's a 500GB drive so it will take a very long time (it's already been running a couple of hours). I wasn't aware of Data Rescue 6, I'll give it a go if this fails!

My friend is prepared to pay for the recovery, but I don't really have an idea how much it will be - £100 or £1000?

Thanks for all the replies so far!

They will give you a quote. It could be either of the amounts you mentioned or more. Depending on what's required to get the data.

Just be aware. While using those recovery programs to check is free. The time spent trying to do that recovery. Could be causing more damage. Turning a possible professional recovery into an impossible recovery. That's the danger in trying to save money and do it yourself first.

 

[MarkC426]

Hi folks. Currently managing to run Disk Drill. It's a 500GB drive so it will take a very long time (it's already been running a couple of hours). I wasn't aware of Data Rescue 6, I'll give it a go if this fails!

I'm very surprised that the drive hasn't ejected itself or caused the system to kernel panic, as has happened in the past...

My friend is prepared to pay for the recovery, but I don't really have an idea how much it will be - £100 or £1000?

Thanks for all the replies so far!

Just out of curiosity, how are you connecting to this drive (i.e. powered interface) and to what Mac....?

 

[Sharky II]

I've tried various 2.5" caddy's. Right now, as Disk Drill is running, it' s connected to my old Mac Pro with a PCIe USB3,1 card, in a 2.5" enclosure that is/was used for one of my SSDs.

It's up at over 80GB now, but it's all applications and system files, none of the actual data that my friend wants/needs (yet)...

 

[Sharky II]

Experiencing something weird - firstly I'm using Disk Drill and trying to recover ~ 350GB of data. Yes, a lot - basically my friend's entire Users/<username>/ folder, minus the Library folder.

The good news is that I can 'see' many of the files and the folder structure. I've started the process and recovered 40 files (775MB) so far... they appear on my drive and are readable! I'm confused as to why it's letting me do it, shouldn't make me upgrade to the Pro (paid) version?

The file names and folder structures are all in tact (so far).

The bad news... Disk Drill is saying it will take.. ahem... 60 days to recover all the data, and the time is going up. This seems crazy to me!

Also, I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the software, but I'm using the free version and I can't really see what the limitation is - it's not making buy the software, it's actually just letting me recover the files, albeit extremely slowly.

Does anybody have any advice to help speed this up? I don't mind a few days.... but two months (and increasing) is a little excessive!

 

[MarkC426]

I think that is the nature of the process unfortunately.
Plus a drive that old is probably only at USB 2 speeds, even though on USB 3.

 

[Sharky II]

It's just a 2'5" SATA internal drive, in a USB3 caddy, not a USB2 drive, but most of the time it/the system isn't doing anything. Not a lot of drive activity. few kb/sec every now and again!

One contributing issue to the problem could be that the drive is almost completely full. around 7-8GB free.. yes, I used to tell him all the time not to do that, and to back up, but here we are...

If it works, my friend is footing the electric bill for a maxed out 12-core 5,1 Mac Pro...

Edit: Oh... it's dropped to 58days from 59... there's hope!!

 

[MarkC426]

I have never done it myself, but did read another post here recently, and it was stated similar LONG processing times.
As you say, the drive being full doesn't help.
Is there an option to delete any unwanted data, to free it up, or does it work on a file by file process.

Looking at your post #5, could you select a category at a time rather than a full recovery.

 

[Sharky II]

I think selecting a folder at a time (desktop, downloads, documents etc) would have been a more sensible option, but it's going now and I don't really want to stop it. I knew it was unwise when I did it... it's not a full recovery, just the home folder minus the Library folder, so no applications, system, main library etc. Still a lot though.

Given the drive's fragile state, I didn't want to start deleting anything or messing with the drive's structure. In fact when you looked at it in the finder, the computer would restart or the drive would eject... so to get this far, I don't want to mess with anything.

It's dropped to 50 days... at this rate of progression, we'll be done by bedtime! (Kidding...)

 

[velocityg4]

its likely hitting bad areas. Bringing the days way up. You’ll probably hit patches of good areas. Quickly copying data. Then hitting rough patches and slowing down again.

 

[Sharky II]

That's exactly what's happening. It was down to 12 days a little while ago, before I left it.

 

[Sharky II]

I managed to use Disk Drill to recover all of my friend's data, although it took about 2 weeks in total.

I went in and specifically chose the data folders (videos, photos, etc) required rather trying to recover the OS/everything