Hi all,

My sisters USB hard drive where she keeps all of her photos (with no backups!) from the last umpteen years has gone tits up. She’s tried all the normal bits of software (Recuva etc) but without delving into the realms of the linux boot discs etc she needs to find a firm of data recovery people. (I could but i’m not keen to cock it up and be responsible for her losing her data!)

Does anyone have any suggestions of data recovery firms – i’m loathed to let her take it into PC world!

Seagate or Fields.

I’ve used CBL Data Recovery a few times over the years for work. They will check your drive and give you a quote. If you don’t want to go ahead they will return your drive. I’ve not shopped around as they’ve always given good service but they don’t seem too expensive.

You might get away with taking the drive out of the USB caddy, sometimes it’s that that goes mad rather than the drive itself.

Ontrack are the gold standard for recovery.

Backups are cheap. Reliable data recovery is expensive. Ontrack will do a free evaluation and quote, but it’ll probably be in the order of several hundred quid.

Knoll ontrack were always good for hard drives when I worked in PC support. They can work magic but it is not cheap.

OK thanks everyone. Will pass these on. Depends how much she values her photos – I’d pay quite a lot in the same situation .

As said above; could be the caddy rather than the physical disk.

I’d take the external disk apart; plug it directly into a PC and then take a raw dump of the disk and try to extract the data from that. If it’s got some bad sectors you have a good chance of recovering something; but it depends how much damage has been done in the process of attempting to recover the data already.

For anyone else *always run recovery tools on an image of the bad drive* – it’s the lowest risk way of recovering. And if you can’t image the drive you’ve got no chance of recovering any data off it with software.

I’d be happy to take a look if you’re anywhere in the north (or are brave enough to risk sticking it in the post) – but obviously; I’m not a data recovery company 🙂

Used to hear good things about RetroData back when I used to do more IT stuff. Possibly more consumer friendly prices that some of the bigger guys.

That’s the thing. I could do the data recovery myself, however I wouldnt want to be (or put anyone else doing me a favour) in the position where the best of intentions have screwed it up. Thank you for the kind offer tho.

A single dump of the disk is unlikely to make anything worse; but sure – I understand the sentiment 🙂

I had this – unfortunately on a RAID 0 Array… which time constraints had stopped me taking BluRay backups from over a considerable period.

Lost loads and loads of photos – some award winning… I now back up in a number of Cloud Storage locations as a result. I have kept the drives if I ever have the funds to get them recovered! I suspect it will be in the thousands though….

Otherwise – the advise above is good. I have taken drives out of caddys and systems into a new external enclosure and managed to recover in the past. Some of the commercially available recovery software is pretty good too, otherwise it is big expense and specialist companies time!

RAID 0 – Ooof – painful. That’s got to be the worst scenario to recover from. Not impossible if the disks are readable. How big / how many were in the set ?

You might be able to get something back with DMDE; but it’d be a long shot.

And image the drives first; ok ? 🙂

4 x 2Tb disks. The drives themselves are okay, it is the bit that tells the system how they go together that corrupted. I am told they “should” be recoverable….

To be honest a lot of the stuff I am not too bothered about, there were a few landscapes and event shots that I would love to have – but they are mostly on Alamy/Getty so I am still able to make something from them – it’s more the pics of my boys when they were wee (although I have smaller copies on FB).

I will get them done one day, just not anytime soon!

4 x 2Tb disks. The drives themselves are okay, it is the bit that tells the system how they go together that corrupted. I am told they “should” be recoverable….

That does sound not so bad; it should be relatively easy to analyse the drives; calculate the striping pattern and recover the data. Just need another 8Gb of disk space to recover it to. It might not be as expensive as you think. The price would only escalate in the event of bad sectors / failed hardware