What does it cost to recover a personal hard drive?

[FireYourJob]

I had a hard drive crash and when I plug it in, I'm prompted if I want to re-format it or not.

I'm hopeful some of the data is recoverable and have tried some of the free download stuff off the internet to no avail.

Anyone have any experience with this in paying a 3rd party to do it?

Do they generally charge the full price if nothing ends up being recoverable?

[Simple Abundant Living]

Following for an old HD I've been hanging on to for the lost pictures.

[warfreak2]

It depends what is wrong with it. Back when I was (more of) an idiot, I spent ~£400 to recover the contents of a water-damaged laptop hard disk which had all of the files for an album I was recording at the time. (Fortunately everything was recovered!) For some things it would have cost significantly less, so that's probably a reasonable upper bound. You have the send the hard disk so they can look at it and give a quote. If they can't recover anything, they'll know that before you have to give them any money.

[The Hamster]

As someone who has just gone through this all I can add is that it very much depends on the condition of the drive, the size of the drive and whether the data is easily recoverable or not.  There is apparently different levels of recovery that cost more as it gets more difficult.  If the HD needs to be pulled apart in a dust free environment to recover the data you could be looking at $1500+ at least that is what I was quoted.  Another quote was $100 per GB so it can vary and end up costing quite a bit.

[Erica/NWEdible]

It cost us about $2K to recover info and photos off an external hard-drive that literally caught on fire when I plugged it in. The 3rd party had to pull the platters off the drive in a clean room and then swap into a new electronic assembly. That hard drive contained all the baby photos of our first child or else we wouldn't have done it.

[Roland of Gilead]

I had a friend with a bad hard drive.  I did some research and found out it was a flaw with the firmware that could cause the drive to get in a unrecoverable (by normal means) state.   I soldered a RS232 level converter to the drive mainboard and was able to reset the drive to normal operation.  I can't remember the brand and model of the drive but a lot of people had encountered this problem.

[BFGirl]

It cost me $60 to recover the info off my daughter's hard drive.

[FireYourJob]

It cost me $60 to recover the info off my daughter's hard drive.

who did you use?

[BFGirl]

It cost me $60 to recover the info off my daughter's hard drive.

who did you use?

http://www.altex.com/

There is a local branch near my house.  Her computer wouldn't even recognize that it had a hard drive and I couldn't even see the hard drive in DOS to try and copy the contents that way.  It could have been a bad connection, but the drive seemed seated and I installed a new hard drive just fine.

[MandyM]

A friend of mine did this recently using an online service I believe and they were able to recover the vast majority of the data. I'll ask her what they used. I know it was a long process - hooked up for a couple of days to see what could be recovered (you don't pay until after this step), then it ran for an entire week.

As a side note, she initially tried taking it to the Geek Squad and they told her there was nothing to recover.

[tariskat]

Mine had to be pulled apart in a dust free environment. They recovered most of my music, pictures, homework, word documents, etc. It cost 700$. Now I back my stuff up every night...

[libertarian4321]

The cost of recovering a hard drive is a lot more than the cost of buying an additional hard drive and backing up the data on the additional hard drive.

This isn't much help to you now, but it might help next time.

[Khan]

The cost of recovering a hard drive is a lot more than the cost of buying an additional hard drive and backing up the data on the additional hard drive.

This isn't much help to you now, but it might help next time.

This. You need to create separate backups, and store them in 2 different locations. At a minimum, I'd use a portable external HDD not always connected

Also, if you're planning on keeping the files for a very long time, you need to look into even further layers of protection, such as fighting bit-rot with par files or some other hashing/checksum checking feature.(I wish the internet was better at explaining this for me).

A very cheap offsite-web backup feature is Amazon's tape backup system(Amazon glacier).

[seanc0x0]

I have a number of files that I want to keep for a long time. These include a bunch of photos, videos, etc of my family.  A year or so ago, I started using a cloud backup service recommended by my coworker, Backblaze, which costs ~$5 a month for unlimited backups. I've got just shy of a terabyte of data stored with them.

I have considered cutting the monthly expense and going to multiple hard drives stored in different locations, but that's a lot more work and has it's own problems. With the prices quoted for file recovery by others in this thread, I'm happy to pay $50/yr (discounted from monthly payments) to have someone else worry about the logistics.

[ketchup]

I had a friend with a bad hard drive.  I did some research and found out it was a flaw with the firmware that could cause the drive to get in a unrecoverable (by normal means) state.   I soldered a RS232 level converter to the drive mainboard and was able to reset the drive to normal operation.  I can't remember the brand and model of the drive but a lot of people had encountered this problem.

Was this a Seagate 7200.11 circa ~2009?  I had a similar thing happen, but Seagate replaced the drive AND recovered all of my data for free after I mailed it in.  Then about a month ago it finally died for real this time.  Backups backups backups.

[Doomspark]

You can TRY booting the computer off a live Linux cd and see if Linux can see the hard drive.  If it can, then you can yank all the files off.  I've done this for people a few times.

Also, peripherally related: 
http://www.amazon.com/Files-that-Last-Gary-McGath-ebook/dp/B00CQO5UV2

Files That Last - a book about digital preservation.  Worth the 8 bucks, IMNSHO.

[Khan]

You can TRY booting the computer off a live Linux cd and see if Linux can see the hard drive.  If it can, then you can yank all the files off.  I've done this for people a few times.

Also, peripherally related: 
http://www.amazon.com/Files-that-Last-Gary-McGath-ebook/dp/B00CQO5UV2

Files That Last - a book about digital preservation.  Worth the 8 bucks, IMNSHO.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I consider myself a techy, a geek, and even I've gotten lost trying to figure out how I want to store files for long term.. The best I've come up with(without offsite backups) is mirroring my main HDD with an external, and I'm eventually going to get 2 HDD's where I was going to 'rar bunches of files and provide many par files.

Individual "in use" files when I need them get stored in at least 2 locations. Either HDD/SD Card or google drive.

[Lan Mandragoran]

Google spinrite made by Steve Gibson ;). Security now podcast followers will know the product.

The Linux live cd is a good idea. Specially if the os is toast but not the filesystem

[skip207]

First thing I would do is remove HDD and put into a caddy and then plug that into a good PC.  If the disk is spinning up ok then you should in theory be able to recover the contents.  The biggest issue is physical failure of the mechanical parts.  If this happens do not use the drive again - it will have to be recovered as above in a clean room = ££££.

If the drive does not spin up at all then the control PCB might be duff, its sometimes possible to buy a used drive of same spec and year etc for cheap on ebay ad then swap over the control board on the back of the drive (some drives they make it so you cant do this).

If its spinning ok, just not reading then its time to look at software recovery.  Either way if you do get the data back throw the drive. 

Backup wise if you have a lot of personal info like kids photos etc then buy something like a Synology DS216.  Throw a couple of WD reds in and off you go.  Even if one of the drives fail you will still have all your data.  This is what I have.  2 x 4TB drives.  I also use it as a media server.  I had a drive fail on the NAS earlier in the year but WD replaced it for me.  No data loss of course, just had to down power the NAS to ensure no other issues whilst only had 1 drive working.

[jim555]

One word - Clonezilla.  Use it often.