How to properly choose a company for recovery of your data
We know that your data is important to you. Therefore, you want to place their recovery in hands of someone who is the most capable of restoring them.
There is usually only one chance to save the data.
If one company fails to recover the data, because of interventions that need to be performed in the rescue process, there is only a small chance that the data will be saved elsewhere. Choosing the right company, is therefore, essential.
The chances of data recovery from a damaged disk in an under-equipped laboratory with little experience arenonexistent. Today's hard drives are mechanically and electrically very complicated equipment, tuned during manufacture maximum capacity. Any unauthorized intervention will prevent successful data recovery. Even a simple switch on of a damaged disk may be its last.
But how to choose the right company to recover your data? You usually need a service like this only once in a lifetime and for a person unfamiliar of the area choosing the right company is very difficult given the size of the Internet.
We have prepared a few points you should look out for during selection process to minimize the risk of losing your data entirely.
- Is the selected company a real laboratory for data recovery?
Make sure that the company that will diagnose your disk is really a laboratory with equipment for recovering data from drives with hardware defects. There are only a few companies in the Slovak Republic with basic equipment for data recovery. Other companies and individuals offering data recovery are able to resolve only software damages. If they receive a disk with hardware damage, at best, they send it to a different company for a commission, and in the worst case, they try to save the data themselves. In any case, they turn the disk on to see the type of damage. And exactly this switch-on may be the disk’s last one
- Is the company trustworthy?
Find available information about the company. The company’s website very often only states "well-coordinated team of experts with many years of practice" without any details or company history. You are most likely dealing with individuals without sufficient equipment and expertise, or a "clone" of another company (some companies offer data recovery under more brands when so when a single brand becomes known as an unreliable one, they have more in stock). You may have seen the famous case of a company which was investigated by the police (they intentionally damaged a disk during diagnosis so that another company was unable to perform data recovery and the customer was thus forced to use this company‘s services at inflated prices). This company and its clones are still working and you can even find them in top place of web searches.
- How will the company treat your confidential data?
It is beneficial to realize that in the event of a successful data recovery, the company will have full access to your data. Larger companies usually offer to sign a confidentiality agreement, they have sufficient protection against data leakage (some even have NSA certification for handling classified information) and due to the greater number of contracts do not even have time to scrutinize your data.
- Do not be tempted by said high success rate and low prices.
100% success rate of data recovery is impossible. There is always the possibility that the data rescue fails. Some defects are of such magnitude that a recovery is excluded. A common practice of some companies is to get damaged media from the customer at any price (very low price in the price list on the web at telephone consultation or when accepting the contract). However, once the company receives your disk, it declares that the defect is severe and will require you to pay several times the aforementioned amount (and on top of it claim that the data cannot be recovered anywhere else).
Remember that you usually only have one chance to save your data.
If the lost data is important to you, don’t look for the cheapest price. Look for professional services.
