After having her 80GB Western Digital portable USB hard drive, which was a Western Digital 2.5″ IDE laptop drive inside the enclosure, to another lab for an assessment and getting a price quote higher than she valued the data, our customer found out about Recovery Force through some online forums where people were suggesting she send it to us for a second opinion and, hopefully, a better price. In a brief correspondance with the customer discussing why she chose to send the drive to us, she mentioned that all the positive reviews online coupled with the flat rate data recovery pricing on our website, she was given comfort.
The Other Lab’s Diagnosis and Quote for Data Recovery
The first lab who assessed the drive gave a diagnosis that the platters were healthy and that the only issue the customer had was a damaged file system following her allowing Windows to do a chkdsk file system repair.
The price quote for the economy recovery service was around 2000USD with a turn around of a week or more.
Recovery Force’s Diagnosis and Quote for Data Recovery
Upon receiving the customer’s drive, we did a quick visual assessment to confirm that the seals were not broken and that the drive has not been opened. We then proceeded to connect the drive to our recovery system where we quickly backed up the firmware and started the process to image the drive.
All four read/write heads appeared to be reading, but very slowly compared to the speeds we would expect for a heallthy drive. We were able to get a full clone of the drive, with about a couple dozen unreadable damaged sectors. This made it clear to us why Windows was having issues accessing the data on the drive and what prompted it to run chkdsk.
Now, as for the file system damage caused by chkdsk, some files were already named to a system generated file name in a folder called Found.000; however, after running a full scan with our file sytem recovery software, we were able to reconstruct most of the original file structure, with a few system genrated folder names.
Because the drive didn’t even need to be opened up in our clean room or have any advanced data recovery procedures like firmware repair, we were able to complete the recovery and have it ready to ship back to the customer within 24 hours of receiving it at our base rate of 500CAD, which is about 375USD at the time of writing this article.
Needless to say, we have another happy customer.
Why the Huge Price Difference?
We can’t speculate as to exactly why many of our competitors charge so much more than we do, but we can tell you the reasoning behind our current pricing model.
When we first started into data recovery services in the 1990’s, we were like many computer service centres where we did what we could and outsourced what we couldn’t. We spent almost a decade trying to partner with larger clean room labs to negotiate better pricing for our customers, hoping that our volume of cases would help. Unfortunately, even with the discounted rates, we found our customers unable to pay the extremely high prices that we were forced to quote.
After we started to do our own clean room work, we decided to be the lab that we wish we had when we were outsourcing projects. Beyond our very competitive rates, we also encourage our customers to reach out and ask us questions, frequently providing data recovery advice to our resellers. Rather than have a marketing and sales team, we just focus on making our resellers happy.
Basically, we aren’t out to get rich. We just want to provide top level data recovery service to those who don’t want to or cannot afford to pay thousands.
Does Recovery Force Have the Equipment and Facilities Like the Other Labs?
Well, that can be a loaded question. It is fairly safe to say that most professional data recovery labs use the same tools and equipment, such as products from PC3000 and DeepSpar. Some labs have more equipment than others, while others may have more knowledge on how to use the equipment than others. The team at Recovery Force doesn’t claim to know everything. When we encounter weird new issues, we will reach out to our product support team, as well as our peers in the industry, to find the answers we need. We are a proud founding member of the recently formed group called, Data Recovery Professionals.
We do our own clean room work on site and have an inventory of thousands of hard drives to be used for parts, as we need them.
We have a great working relationship with our vendors, frequently being called upon for beta testing and feedback of new data recovery products or updates coming to market.
Why Post this Blog?
As we do not pay for advertising and want to keep our pricing competitive, it is our hope that by writing this blog those reading it will help spread the message that data recovery may not be cheap, but it can be affordable.
If you are a reseller, we offer discounts and free advice. If you are Elon Musk rich, we won’t take advantage and gouge you.