Recovery Process

Your media can be dropped off at 6130 Brookstone Pl., Gurnee, IL. 60031 by appointment only or you can send it in to the same address.

Please fill out this form ahead of time, sign it and drop it off with the media. It is extremely important that we have all the information on this form to proceed with the recovery.

This is the most important and often least appreciated part of the recovery. It is far too often that misinformed computer techs spend hours running software against a drive with failing hardware. These efforts are one of the top causes of data becoming permanently unrecoverable. More unsuccessful attempts are made the less chance there is to recover the date. The fact is that the drive in this state requires specialized equipment and experienced technicians who know how to properly diagnose hard drive failures.
Hard drive that is clicking, not spinning, or having other internal malfunctions needs to be connected to specialized tools to prevent further damage. For many cases, just powering on the drive may be causing permanent data loss. Software application used at most shops will only make things worse. Before you let another company evaluate your drive, make sure they have a proper diagnostic equipment and follow appropriate procedures.

Once the initial evaluation is completed we will reach out to You via email and inform you of our findings. If the drive has enough functionality left and we can successfully We are able to access and extract the data from the drive using our specialized tools. This might or might not be a 100% of your data but the drive has enough functionality that allows us to access it. This scenario will follow our standarized pricing you can find here.

Although the hard drive is now fixed, it can’t be just plugged into a computer and copied as you might expect. In most cases repaired hard drives are very unstable and will inevitably fail again. It takes specialized equipment to safely extract all the data after repair. This equipment will always include a hardware / software combination to control every element of the data reading process. Complex algorithms are generally used to focus on reading only the undamaged sections of the platter surfaces before moving on the damaged areas. This ensures that a majority of the data is extracted in most cases before the the drive is degraded even further.

Tools which we use for safe data extraction after hard drive repair:

• PC-3000 with Data Extractor Software Package
• DeepSpar Disk Imager System

Utilizing those tools we capture the backup copy of all the sectors on the drive which enables us to only “touch” your drive once preventing any further damage. All subsequent steps are performed against that backup copy.

After the data is read from the drive at a sector level it must be fixed up to be useful to the customer. When hardware failures occur it is very common for the key parts of the file system to be damaged as well. This damage can make files and folders go missing, or can cause the entire drive to be unrecognizable by the operating system.

At this point using data recovery software combined with some expert manual repairs the file system is rebuilt. Often this is handled by running software analysis of all remaining file system structures to build a file tree. Further scanning is often performed to find data which may have been lost from file table entries which could not be read from the original media. The individual files and folder structure is then copied to our portal or a replacement destination drive which will be returned to the customer upon payment.

Report with the listing of all recovered files is provided via email to the customer. You have the chance review and approve.

Once customer approves the list of recovered files invoice for the recovery is sent out.

Once the invoice is paid we deliver recovered data to you. There are several options you can choose from:

• download it from our customer portal – usually 1GB of data can be downloaded in about 7 minutes, we can provide an estimate of what your recovered data will take once job is completed. We’ve seen customers download over 100GB of data in under 24 hours utilizing this method. This cuts down on the cost since the destination hard drive isn’t needed.
• we can upload the files to the cloud drive of your choosing (Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Amazon Drive, Dropbox, etc) if you provide us with access
• purchase the destination hard drive from Us – we have multiple sizes available at a market price. Cost will be determined based on the size of recovered data.

We keep your recovered data on our servers up to 7 days after invoice is paid. Data will be permanently deleted once the 7 day mark is reached or if you request it.