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Do you need to use a professional data recovery service?
Posted by Mark on Sep 23, 2008
I’ll make no bones about it, I work for a data recovery company and believe that a good and professional data recovery service is often the best course of action. However, it is not always economically viable, and I am aware of cases where people have gone down the paid route and had a simple problem dealt with for rather a lot of money.
I’m not accusing data recovery companies of ripping people off, I am sure there are some that do, but on the whole they do not. But, with any business there are costs to be covered and if you employ a brain surgeon to bandage a sprained ankle you won’t get charged a first aider’s rate.
There are cases where experienced assistance is almost certainly required. Hardware failures with hard disks, electronic problems with USB pens, snapped or overwritten backup tapes, and the most plentiful source of such assistance is a data recovery company.
What if you have deleted a few files or re-formatted your camera card? Well under these circumstances there is software you can buy for relatively little cost that might well solve the problem. Check the reviews, read through the DR forums, and make a decision.
The only thing I would say is measure the risk. If we get a disk that has a damaged partition table, or deleted files, we secure an image copy immediately and then make a backup of this. There is then no danger of anything being made worse. If you choose to use a piece of recovery software from the net you might not have the option to secure everything first.
So where are we going with this? A Data Recovery company is not the only answer to a data loss problem, but if you choose to do-it-yourself you need to be sure you understand the risks and that they are worth taking.
