We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.
I’m just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.
One specific question I have pertains to what’s recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We’re only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there’s tons of OS and other files we don’t want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?
Drivesavers!
They’re not cheap, but they can damn near recover anything.
Example: We had a sales rep. in Saudi Arabia for a month. On the way there he dropped his laptop bag. Wouldn’t startup and made a rattling sound when shook.
For over a month he had a detached read/write head dancing across the drive platters. (He kept his replacement laptop and the damaged one together in his bag…)
Drivesavers managed to recover every file but one. Also the first time they failed to recover the entire drive for us, and we sent them <5/year. When we got the drive back it was shocking how much damage that head did to those platters, and amazing they only failed on one file!
This was over 2 decades ago and cost us $2.3K. Not sure what they’re charging these days or if they can selectively recover files/folders as we always did the entire drive.
But if you absolutely need that data they’ll get it!
Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer in my last job.
Thank you for the tip. I will make sure they’re on my list.