Losing your valuable data or information can be catastrophic! In today's day and age making a daily backup simply isn't enough; your backups still end up being transferred to a hard drive or another storage media device. These storage devices can fail due to numerous circumstances, most of which are related to end users fault. In some situations hard drives can fail due to poor manufacturing but in most cases improper storage such as extensive heat, cold, dust, etc. is responsible for the failure. With these kinds of malfunctions software recovery is not possible as the hard drive either doesn't spin or cannot read anything from the platters (disks). This is when you should seek help from an experienced data recovery specialist.
Finding a reliable and experienced data recovery provider is a must! If your hard drive ends up in an inexperienced company, you could lose your data forever. Most individuals seek help from a local IT, before contacting a data recovery company. Make sure that you or your IT does NOT open the hard drive chassis; if opened in an improper environment, the dust particles from the air could damage your platters and make the data unrecoverable. Drives have to be opened in a Class-100 clean room, which utilizes a dust free environment. Therefore, when seeking a data recovery specialist be sure to ask if they have a clean room facility.
Do not be fooled by companies who promise 99% success ratio. Data recovery is not an exact science and as such each malfunction varies on case to case basis. This makes it impossible for anyone to provide accurate diagnostics or success rate over the phone. Although data can be retrieved in most situations, there are instances when nothing can be recovered. These instances are mainly due to severe physical damage to the platters inside the hard drive. The best way to determine company’s success ratio is to ask for references from their previous clients to insure credibility, knowledge and therefore chances of a successful recovery.
