Recommendations on Data Recovery

[rocknpop]

hi guys, my OWC FireWire hard drive just failed and I can't get it to work. I'm going to need to send it out for repair or just for data recovery. What are the best known companies (most reliable and economically feasible) out there? OWC recommended a company that ranges between $500 and $1500 for recovery... I really don't want to pay $1,500 for this... thoughts?

 

[ZapNZs]

I have experience with sending drives out to Data Tech Labs, and they consistently recover the data files a customer needs. They are thorough, but not very fast when it comes to turnaround time. Pricing-wise, they are right around that $500 to $1,500 mark with hardware recovery, and the wide variation is, to my understanding, because they cannot give a firm quote until they have the drive in their possession where they can assess the severity of the damage and the amount of work needed to recover how much data - however, because of such a wide variation in pricing, most respectable firms will provide free estimates followed by a consultation to explain what went wrong and what has to happen to get the data back. FWIW, most drives we send out are closer to $500-750 than $2,000.

Is the drive making odd noises, not spinning up, spinning up but not mounting, throwing SMART errors indicating hardware failure? I am guessing you have already ruled out the chance that it was either a failed enclosure and/or directory corruption?

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"OWC recommended a company that ranges between $500 and $1500 for recovery... I really don't want to pay $1,500 for this... thoughts?"

My thoughts are -- if you don't want to pay, then you aren't getting the data back.

Take a DEEP breath and ask yourself -- would it REALLY be worth that much to you to get that stuff back? Are there things on the drive which are that important?

Have you tried downloading "Data Rescue", then "aiming it" at the problem drive, to see what happens? You -might- be able to recover much of the data yourself. You WILL need a SECOND hard drive to serve as "the recovery drive" for such an operation. I've done this myself. Even so, years later I'm -still working- on the recovered files from that drive to get them "back into shape".

I learned the hard way what I'm going to tell you next.
This is what happens when you don't keep a backup of stuff that's important to you.

I suggest that you also start learning about "backing up".
Creating clones of external storage using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper would be a good place to start.

 

[rocknpop]

Is the drive making odd noises, not spinning up, spinning up but not mounting, throwing SMART errors indicating hardware failure? I am guessing you have already ruled out the chance that it was either a failed enclosure and/or directory corruption?

Yes, the drive is making noises (trying to spin) but my macbook is not recognizing the drive and prompting me to reformat it.

OP wrote:
"OWC recommended a company that ranges between $500 and $1500 for recovery... I really don't want to pay $1,500 for this... thoughts?"

My thoughts are -- if you don't want to pay, then you aren't getting the data back.

Take a DEEP breath and ask yourself -- would it REALLY be worth that much to you to get that stuff back? Are there things on the drive which are that important?

Have you tried downloading "Data Rescue", then "aiming it" at the problem drive, to see what happens? You -might- be able to recover much of the data yourself. You WILL need a SECOND hard drive to serve as "the recovery drive" for such an operation. I've done this myself. Even so, years later I'm -still working- on the recovered files from that drive to get them "back into shape".

I learned the hard way what I'm going to tell you next.
This is what happens when you don't keep a backup of stuff that's important to you.

I suggest that you also start learning about "backing up".
Creating clones of external storage using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper would be a good place to start.

Thanks for the input. Yes, it is worth the money, but as a financially responsible person, I need to check my alternatives and weigh the pros and cons.

Thanks for the suggestion on backing up, this was my backup drive, unfortunately, I had just installed a new SSD and hadn't gotten around creating the copy. Unfortunate...

 

[ZapNZs]

Yes, the drive is making noises (trying to spin) but my macbook is not recognizing the drive and prompting me to reformat it.

1. Is this a HFS+ formatted drive?
2. Have you checked what a SMART program like DriveDX or SmartMonTools says? - what, if any, metrics are bad?
3. Have you tried a different enclosure?
4. Depending on what the SMART program says, do you have access to a program called DiskWarrior?