Data Recovery and Disk Repair: A Guide to Software and Services

Round-ups
By Stephen Lawton
published

Depending on the severity and nature of your hard drive problems, data recovery solutions can range from free software to expensive services.

Data Recovery and Disk Repair Service Comparison Table

Editor's Note: In the following chart, we present some essential and basic information about some of the industry leaders in data recovery and disk repair. Several companies did not respond to our request for information. It is also worth noting that in gathering the data for the matrix that begins on the next page, almost every single provider was reluctant to take part, claiming that the data recovery and disk repair industry was full of specious companies, most of whom make false promises. We removed from the charts claims about being the best, or being first. Because data recovery typically involves vital data worth paying for, we suggest that you do your homework and check references.

DataMechanix

DriveSavers

DTI Data Recovery

Stephen Lawton
3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • trekzone
    Great article...
    Reply
  • TyrOd
    Everyone on this list without exception uses PC-3k. I know this for a fact.
    When you askedabout their "advanced recovery" you should have asked if they design their own imaging hardware/controllers.
    Everything else can mean just fluff like spacers for HR changers(Gilware) to things like custom software tools(which everyone should have).

    Going down the list here's some more information clarification for the readers:
    Hard Drive Manufacturers:
    Western Digital lists everyone here because they get paid commissions and want the greatest amount of choices. Platinum Partners on the WD partner site like Drivesavers and Ontrack pay monthly for that placement.

    Hitachi and G-Technology who are wholly owned subsidiaries of WD have a separate partner site where they separately list partners(Data rescue Center, Ontrack, Drivesavers, etc...).

    Toshiiba has an internal support page, Seagate uses there own SRS for Data Recovery.

    IN GENERAL; the Drive manufacturers support organizations know little to nothing about the data recovery process and often make things worse in their attempt to troubleshoot.

    A good example(though by far not the only one) is G-Tech's relationship with Data rescue center where Data rescue is a reseller of G-Tech's drive and perpetuates bad assumptions about recovery to peddle their software(they were a software company for 20 years before opening a lab).

    Also..."Personal data on a damaged hard disk can be restored, he says, without needing to open any files to confirm the restoration".

    This is absolutely not true either and this is just a business model decision.

    What ends up happening is Ontrack's end users get "compelted" recovery projects with corrupt data and no recourse.
    you would think this happens only for things like individual documents(where you obviously can't tell if there's corruption just by staring at a hex dump) but even things like Virtual Machines/databases being unatachable or corrupt come out of this kind of policy by Ontrack(and others of course).

    The raw numbers:

    I have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the number of technicians being listed here because I know what a serious top tier Lab like SRS9at least before this year) looks like in terms of it's engineers.

    Also I have a BIG problem with any lab that refers to it's engineers as "repair...(something)". data recovery involves the repair of drives incidentally...and there's a significant distinction in professionalism and ethics from those that actually TRY to repair drives and data recovery engineers.

    There's a lot more I could talk about here and notable companies that are missing(and some that are oddly inconsistent from the RAID recovery article list), but frankly that's kind of the nature of the industry. unless you've been in the trenches for a while, you cna't really peel back the layers completely.

    You did a decent job here, though. Better than i've seen as of yet.

    Reply
  • Santanu_Saha
    Thanks Stephen Lawton! for the valuable artical regarding data recovery and disk repair. It will very much helpful for midsize businesses to recover data absolutely free. Backup and disk imaging products, such as Acronis True Image, StorageCraft ShadowProtect, Marcium Reflect, Symantec’s Norton Ghost and many others are able to create full disk images that are exact duplicates of the original disk. It also explain head crash, or failures in a RAID environment
    Reply