[Gllug] [OT] Data Recovery companies

[Rich Walker]

Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 02:36:39PM +0100, Tethys wrote:
>> 
>> Ashley Evans writes:
>> 
>> >Google returns a myriad of companies.  Anybody with positive first hand 
>> >experience ?
>> 
>> Nope. Every time I've been in that situation, the owner of the data has
>> always decided that they'd rather lose it than pay for recovery. It's
>> *very* expensive.
>
> Does anyone have any figures on exactly how expensive?

I paid somewhere in the £400-£500 mark for hardware recovery to new
disk.

Later, I noticed the same company were offering to do software recovery
(i.e. "my filesystem is fscked" or "I deleted all the files") for c.a. £120.


> FWIW I spent last weekend recovering a 40GB FAT-format hard drive by
> hand for a friend who had somehow managed to (or Windoze had managed
> to) write data from another disk over the start.  FAT1 was completely
> lost.  About 30% of FAT2 was also lost.  I wrote a bunch of programs
> which used heuristics to locate directories, rebuild the tree (using
> the remains of the FAT where appropriate), and recover the files.

I remember having to do this to an Acorn h/d after I accidentally broke
the root directory. It was surprisingly entertaining, given the level of
sweat and fear in the room...

> I'm not going to charge my friend - although I have given him stern
> warnings about this being the once and only time and to buy a USB disk
> for backups.  But how much *would* that sort of work cost?  Maybe I
> should have a sideline ...

Someone I know had his mate-who-does-work in to do some work on the
computer. Said mate was supposed to add a drive and get the new drive to
work. He then broke one of the old drives, did the recovery, and charged
his hourly rate for the work... 

cheers, Rich.

-- 
rich walker         |  Shadow Robot Company | rw at shadow.org.uk
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