Has anyone used any specialist data recovery services to retrieve data of dead drives? My SSD boot drive in my main PC has suddenly died. Most stuff was backed up on another drive or in Google drive or One drive, but more recent stuff wasn't, so I don't really have any choice but to try and get the rest recovered, if I can afford it. Any recommendations?
Kroll Ontrack is one of the best, but spendy. Expect to be paying in the multiple hundreds, even if you're in no rush. They'll look at it for free, though (PDF warning.) Recovery'll take three working weeks, mind you, unless you're willing to pay to bump yourself up the queue.
Can vouch for Ontrak. We use them at work for important data when someone destroys a laptop. not happened for a year or so. But They can now do SSD drives to the same standard i believe as mechanical media. So if you have the money for it and the docs are that important they are the only real choice. If you need it quick prepare to pay alot of money.
Another vouch - I've only used them once but the way they went about their business was impressive. In the end there were bits they couldn't recover, but that's just the nature of the beast. This cannot be understated - we had people on-site same day, or maybe it was next day. Many, many thousands were paid (I want to say £60k? Though my memory may do me a disservice). Even if you're not in a hurry though, be prepared to spend quite a bit. Generally speaking their services are not for getting back pictures of your cat.
My old company used Kroll Ontrack as well, as has been mentioned before in this thread, they are bloody expensive though. Never had any issues with them, one incident we had required a 24 hour turnaround for the princely sum of £3500...
"What's this? £30,000 to upgrade our backup systems? We can't justify that, it's not a profit centre. Make do with what you've got."
Hey, that sounds familiar! Did we used to work together? I mentioned it to a friend of mine that was also involved, reminiscing. He reminded me that it was tape and not disk. A DBA did something stupid, and the primary backup was on tape, which was the first sign of bad times to come. The latest set had a tape that kept running into an I/O error and Kroll were called in to attempt to resolve, alas they could not. We ended up getting a version of the DB back that was weeks old, so we may as well not have bothered to start with. Tape: Fine for backups, sh** for restores. It staggers me to this day the number of people still feel warmer and fuzzier when their backup data is sitting on a tape rather than disk with all of these not-to-ne-trusted new-fangled snapshots and de-dupe and all that
At least with tape if you lose something really important you can unwind it and use it as a makeshift noose.
