DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

It isn't a matter of if you have an external hard drive failure. When you do you should be aware that there are scam companies out there waiting for you to give them a thousand dollars. Oh, they will tell you $240 but I promise you, it's more likely to be more than that. Companies like WD and Seagate should have their own data recovery entities without fearing that some drive owner will expect free service for recovery. In the last 30 years, I have had only two drive failures and both were probably caused by poor handling on my part. When this happens we are sent out to the wolves. I do back up in several places but occasionally I get lazy and that's when Mrs. Murphy shows up. Recently, I had a failure and contacted a company named Field's Data Recovery. In my opinion, they are a SCAM. I paid them almost $1,000. to recover 2,305 files in 32 folders. Lucky for me that this 3TB drive is a knock-about drive with miscellaneous images. Many of which I have backed up but I was willing to pay because I don't like to lose anything and I can afford the payment. I have received nothing from them except excuses from a very poor customer account person. I filed a dispute with my card holder, with whom I have had a flawless account with for almost 50 years, and never having filed a dispute I was assured I would get aggressive action. Be careful choosing those you do business with and backup frequently, because it will happen to you. Remember this name: Field's Data Recovery and do business with someone else.

David in Dallas Loc: Dallas, Texas, USA

I had a drive failure a couple of years ago and used a local firm to do the recovery (don't remember the name). They actually sent the drive off to a place in Ohio, which recovered the data and put it on a new drive. The fee seemed reasonable to me and included the cost of the new drive. They were able to recover the entire data and I was very satisfied.

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

When I worked in IT I used a company in Palm Beach Florida but I can't remember their name. A simple recovery, that's when the drive is still working well enough to retrieve data through software, ran about $200.00, but in many cases I could do that myself. If the drive was not working and they had to tear down the drives and put the disks in a similar drive did cost about $900.00 but if they couldn't retrieve the data they only billed us $100.00. I used them a number of times and I thought the rates were fair considering how much time it takes to do the work. With software retrieval my minimum was $200.00. To avoid this I always recommended a minimum 4 drive NAS system for my clients that had a lot of important data to back and didn't want to send it to an outside company.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

When I was working for the IT department for the state.... we would get drive failures often, one possible quick recovery trick, place the drive in the freezer over night, then connect it the following morning, often it would run long enough to duplicate or get a copy of the data, or that one important file.

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

That's an old trick but it does work, I've used it myself a few times.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

There is another trick that helped me once... internal drive failed, I tried pulling it out to replace it, it was stuck in the tower case, pried & pried on it with a screwdriver, it broke loose suddenly, flew out of the tower and smacked itself on the wall and floor. Reconnected it and it was fine the rest of the day :)

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

Thanks for telling us of your experience. The freezer trick works sometime when a hard drive shuts down because of excessive heat.

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

That's a good one. I always jokingly said to customers when their computers were giving troubles to just kick the damn thing. You know, I think it worked a couple of times.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

I like the freezer trick. I am very hard on equipment of any kind – it's just my nature. I expect to pay for my mistakes and I demand that I am treated well. Nikon. Apple, Adobe, B&H, BestBuy, Amazon, and a few others really do a good job and it keeps me coming back. Field's Data Recovery treated me like they might do me a favor if and when they got around to it, maybe. My credit card company has already gotten me action, I'm happy to report.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Yep, as a matter of fact, that’s my first action if the drive won’t spin up after several tries - a slap with the palm of the hand on the flat surface of the drive. Typically the drive will spin up and then you want to immediately get everything copied off because it’s likely to fail again. This is a last resort, and ONLY if the drive isn’t spinning. I’ve used the freezer trick also - just make sure to place it in a plastic bag with minimum air and let it come up to room temp before trying it. If you take it out too soon and water condenses on the platter, you’re inviting a head crash.

applepie1951 Loc: Los Angeles,California

I agree with David Pine 500%, I had the exact same thing happen to me and I mean exact same thing and I contacted a company in Irvine California and was told the exact same word for word, but I wasn’t willing to pay thousands of dollars I just took my lose and learned a lesson and now I back up automatically using Apple Time Machine, Data recovery company’s are scam artist cause they know you want your files recovered but the prices they charge is crazy, do yourself a favor, Backup,BACKUP,BACKUP

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

I hope I'm not the only one here scratching my head about this question. It should not be an issue.

If and when I have an external hard drive failure my solution is to destroy it, discard it and replace it. I never put anything on a single external hard drive, always on two.

I keep two drives attached to my desktop. All my important files are sync'd to them automatically every three hours. Once a month I swap one of the two drives with a third one in my safe deposit box at the bank.

I'm retired but my time is still too valuable to waste on recovering data from a failed external drive.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

Long story short = one of the drives in my 2-drive external gave sign of degradation. gthe 2 drive system configured with RAID ! (mirror copying). Drive system presented a command I misunderstoor - a 3x5 index card icon titled "Remove" [pwhich Itook to mean OK to remove drive now. Turns out it meant remove data - The PC repair firm I've been using for at least 10 years sent the drives of ot a data recover company. They sai d could recover at a cost of $1,800. Given the drive include all of the information I had accumulated about my photographic hobby - not just images - I said OK. What was returned was not my data recovered - my picture- directory was - but nothing else. I talked to the data firm, they said they recovered my data, they looked at my drive and said that was not what they sent back and talk to the repair firm. So far, the pc repair man is saying that they gave me what the data recovery firm gave them.

And I'm sitting in the middle. Hopefully this will soon resolve favorably - I get my files back. My daughter, who is n attorney, has told me that given all circumstances I have a very weak case to go to court with.

kmocabee

A cloud backup service is cheap and reliable, and really worth it for the peace of mind. Some like Backblaze ($50 a year) have unlimited storage.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2288745,00.asp

If you have one of those the hard drive failures become trivial.

erickter Loc: Dallas,TX

Good to know. Very objective analysis. Thanks for the heads up. I back up daily (more during critical production periods) to 2 external Seagate drives that are rotated with another pair. That's on top of a raid 1 mirrored internal drive configuration on a win server OS. Very stable. Saved my bacon several times when Murphy struck.