FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Data recovery is the process of restoring data (pictures, video, music, documents, etc.) to a device that may have been lost, accidentally deleted, corrupted or made non-accessible. The device can be hard drive, USB stick, SD card or any type of memory storage device. We only work with hard drives, HDD or SSD.

If you cannot access the data on the drive even after wasting money on software-based data recovery apps. You need a hardware-based data recovery service instead. We are a hardware-based data recovery service.

Data recovery is an expensive process because of the complexity involved. The first step is to identify the source of the data loss. This can be a hardware failure, software failure, or user error. Once the source is identified, the next step is to determine the extent of the damage.

Data recovery hardware is expensive and you won't find a standard computer repair shop using a hardware-based data recovery system. The computer repair shop will often send the job out to a data recovery service, then mark it up. You can skip the middleman and pay far less by going directly to a hardware-based data recovery service, such as ours.

How do spinning hard drives work?

Inside of that metal rectangular box that you store your data in, are 1 or more spinning disks (platters) coated with magnetic material in much the same way as magnetic recording tape. Hanging over the disks are tiny read/write heads that pick up and lay down data as the disks spin by. The airflow that is generated by the spinning disk lifts the read/write head up just enough to still be able to read & write without actually touching and damaging the disk.

Worn out?: If your spinning hard drive is more than 8-12 years old and you didn’t drop or bang it before it stopped working, it’s probably worn out. It could have worn read/write heads, worn platters or a combination of both. It’s too worn for any computer to understand what the drive is trying to say. The data is pobably ok, but the drive heads are too weak to read from or write to the disk properly. In a case like this, the best thing to do is a "head swap". This where we would find a good head assembly (new or used) and transplant it to your drive, then proceed with the data recovery.

Note: We do not repair hard drives to the point where they can be put back to normal use. We're only after the data.

Yes you can! Your rush job will be started before others not on the Rush list. If others are on the Rush list, we can run up  to 5 drives at the same time. All jobs are not the same and you may have an opening regardless of a Rush list.

For working drives; find lost files, unformat a device, it can take several hours to a whole day.

For non-accessible hard drives NOT requiring physical repair, It can take up to 24hrs for minor corruption, depending on the size of the drive, and up to a week for major corruption (depending on the size of the drive).

For non-accessible drives requiring physical repair, it can take a week to find, recieve & replace the parts. If the physical repair was successful and that was the only issue, then recovery should take 3 to 24 hours (depending on the size of the drive).

Note: We do not repair hard drives to the point where they can be put back to normal use. We're only after the data.

We are open 24/7 by appointment only. You can contact us by visiting Online Estimates.

First, we need to get some information about your drive so we can let you know quickly if we can work on it.

By visiting  our Online Estimates and answering a few questions about the drive's symptoms & behavior, based on the answers you select, we can give you a pretty accurate estimate. An estimate that We will validate when giving you a quote, after looking at your drive.