Hard Drive Recovery- Save Some $$$ Or £££

[Clint Love]

My old, crappy 2008 computer finally gave up the ghost. The screen not only went out, but something else failed and it wouldn't even load windows anymore. Turns out part of the hard drive was corrupted. I back up most of my stuff but there were some newer things I wanted off the old Hard Drive, like 2 complete vlogs that I had in the works when it failed.

Geek Squad would have charged me $200 to recover the files. Other places would charge even more. the HD wasn't totally dead, but it wasn't working properly so that could have cost me up to $1000, depending upon the circumstances. Geek squad charges $49 just to look at it.

I got this little device on Amazon for about $30 altogether. I was able to recover almost all my stuff off that old drive with very little trouble. I'm computer savvy but I'm not a tech or a hacker or anything. Just thought I'd post and maybe save some of you some money in the future.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IYHTBVU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

 

[BlackMamba]

combine that with a data comb software and you can recover most if not all files.

also HDD have a life of about 5 years so i try and replace mine every 3!

 

[Clint Love]

combine that with a data comb software and you can recover most if not all files.

also HDD have a life of about 5 years so i try and replace mine every 3!

That's a good call. I'm going to start doing that too.

 

[SwissMotard]

combine that with a data comb software and you can recover most if not all files.

also HDD have a life of about 5 years so i try and replace mine every 3!

The average lifetime for my drives is over 10 years!

Even my NAS drives are still going after 24/7 use after over 7 years.

 

[kuhlka]

My old, crappy 2008 computer finally gave up the ghost. The screen not only went out, but something else failed and it wouldn't even load windows anymore. Turns out part of the hard drive was corrupted. I back up most of my stuff but there were some newer things I wanted off the old Hard Drive, like 2 complete vlogs that I had in the works when it failed.

Geek Squad would have charged me $200 to recover the files. Other places would charge even more. the HD wasn't totally dead, but it wasn't working properly so that could have cost me up to $1000, depending upon the circumstances. Geek squad charges $49 just to look at it.

I got this little device on Amazon for about $30 altogether. I was able to recover almost all my stuff off that old drive with very little trouble. I'm computer savvy but I'm not a tech or a hacker or anything. Just thought I'd post and maybe save some of you some money in the future.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IYHTBVU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

I worked for Geek Squad for a summer before going into video game development full-time. If the hard drive is failing mechanically, the only way to recover the data is to disassemble the drive in a clean room and use special hardware to recover the data on the platters. If it's an SSD, you're screwed. Best off having multiple backup drives and do backups at least once a month. I use Western Digital Passport drives.

I probably would have stuck with making electronic music back in college if I hadn't had my entire sound library and songs go poof when a hard drive failed. I lost months of work. Since then I've been pretty picky about collecting backup drives, only buying music on sites that let me re-download my purchases (iTunes), and organizing my PCs working data on a secondary hard drive in case my primary SSD fails.