It’s an old refrain, You get what you pay for. But when it comes to data recovery what does this actually mean in reality?

Here is what a specialist data recovery company offer that you won’t find at the £99 or less end of the recovery market: The experienced personnel and specialised equipment necessary to regain access to the data on your drive, whether this means internal surgery within the drive to replace read / write heads or a seized platter motor, or repair of corrupted hard drive firmware.

As soon as access is gained to your drive it will be cloned.

This is time consuming and resource intensive but ensures that the scanning and subsequent data extraction stages of the recovery are carried out on a healthy drive, not on an ailing drive with the only copy in the world of your critical data.

Once the data is recovered you will be supplied not only with a file listing (which on its own is no guarantee that the data to which is refers has been recovered intact) but also with screen shots demonstrating documents and photographs. You will also be invited to ask to see additional screen shots of any data that is particularly important to you.

A backup of the recovered data will be held in our lab while you check your returned data to ensure that you are satisfied with what you have received.

It’s sad but it’s true, in data recovery you get what you pay for.

It is generally the case that if you pass your failed hard drive to your local IT company, or perhaps a shop you have seen in the centre of your town then one of two things will happen.

Firstly they will probably scan your hard drive with some recovery software, if your hard drive is healthy enough to survive this process you will be passed a selection of recovered files which may or may not be the ones that you require.

Typically they will not verify these files and you will find some are intact and some will not open at all. Secondly, if they find they have no access to the drive at all (or perhaps to drive fails while they are scanning it with their recovery software) then they will either tell you that the data is unrecoverable or will pass it to a specialist data recovery company. In the latter case of course there will be a large hike in the cost of data retrieval. their previous scanning activity will also have greatly reduced the chances of a full recovery even by professional recovery engineers.

If your data is not critical then this is a perfectly valid and cost effective recovery path to take.

On the other hand if your data is vital then you should go directly to a specialist data recovery company.

They can cope with almost any physical problems suffered by the hard drive and vitally, they will clone the hard drive as soon as access is obtained and then all subsequent recovery work will be carried out on that clone.