Over the years, we have seen absolute horror stories as a consequence of unwitting victims following seemingly legitimate data recovery advice on the net on how to do a DIY recovery. In fact, quite a high percentage of those were IT / Computer Repair people who thought that there was nothing to lose by following seemingly simple instructions. Data recovery is a highly specialised field required very specific qualifications and with the direct ratio between the amount of experience your data recovery engineer has and the likelihood of a successful recovery! If you value your data-give it to the professionals!

Not necessarily. Once you give your damaged hard drives or other media to a data recovery provider you are at the mercy of that data recovery provider’s qualifications, experience, resources and standards. We have, repeatedly, seen data lost that could have otherwise been recovered. Do your homework and thoroughly evaluate your chosen data recovery provider- make sure that you are giving yourself the best possible chance of a successful data recovery.
We all prefer free services when available, but in the case of data recovery, this should raise a red flag. A thorough data recovery analysis can require a lot of time and careful consideration to determine what the best data recovery route for optimal results – so much so that a lot of data recovery providers, who advertise free evaluations,are often only accounting for and bundling the assessment fee into the eventual end price to the customer – a hint of dishonesty appearing very early in your relationship with them!

This is a fallacy that has endured since the days hard drives were manufactured with much greater manufacturing tolerances and, in certain cases, it was possible to do a data recovery on data that was “overwritten” by virtue of the fact that the head had strayed very slightly since the original read/write operation. Modern hard drives are manufactured to extremely tight manufacturing tolerances and, excepting hard drives manufactured prior to the mid 90s, these opportunities no longer exist as potential data recovery routes. Remember, however, that it was always the case that overwritten data could never be recovered.

In the majority of cases, the fault causing your data to be inaccessible and requiring a data recovery job will not get worse provided the drive is left powered off and stored appropriately. However, this is not always the case – quite a lot of hard drive data recovery arises as a result of a weakening of the electromagnetic medium i.e. magnetism degrading and weakening over time. The Data Recovery operation involves trying to recover data from resulting bad sectors and, generally, is the most likely cause of a “partial recovery”. The problem with these types of failures is that the degradation continues even while the drive is powered off and stored properly.