Is Flat-Rate, Hard Drive Data Recovery Safe?

No matter how many times your IT guy has told you to back up your data, if you haven't been presented with an easy to use backup system you're probably not doing it.

The reason that this is a bad idea is that professional data recovery is extremely expensive, and if your hard drive fails you may be out of luck entirely. However, many computer users have observed a beacon of hope: flat rate hard drive data recovery, an inexpensive alternative to typical data recovery.

Most data recovery services begin with some sort of preliminary evaluation or analysis that lets you know a price before work begins on your hard drive. The advantage is that if there is no evaluation fee and the quoted price for recovery comes out too high, you don't have to pay for anything but return shipping of your hard drive. The disadvantage is that the quoted price can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, and you really only have one chance at recovery since most professional level data recovery companies will charge more if a hard drive has been to one of their rivals.

Flat rate hard drive data recovery services, however, offer to perform professional level data recovery, complete with clean rooms, microcode repair, and all of the other fascinating technology (or completely boring technology, depending on your personal preference) for an inexpensive or at least standardized rate. What's the catch?

Well, for the last ten years or so, the catch has been that the success rate of such services was extremely low. Most companies offering flat rate data recovery simply ran software or performed very minor operations on failed hard drives, and if those methods didn't work, they called a drive unrecoverable (and often made the chances of data recovery quite a bit worse, if not impossible).

Recently, though, some of the leaders in the data recovery field such as ESS Data Recovery and Drivesavers Data Recovery have offered services with a set maximum that users agree to before the data recovery process begins--essentially a flat rate service. The prices are higher than those of the "budget" companies, at about $900 for ESS (Drivesavers charges about double at the time of this article, though their pricing is constantly changing), but the recovery rates are in line with these companies' other cases. They make up the price difference by streamlining cases, usually with a team of qualified engineers each performing or overseeing a particular part of the process--in contrast with the cheaper, less qualified companies, which streamline cases by doing the same techniques in every case.

So how do you know if a flat rate data recovery service is going to be able to handle your case? Frankly, you're going to have to do some research. There are only a handful of companies with full qualifications and a decent list of major clients, among them ESS Data Recovery, Drivesavers, Ontrack Data Recovery, and Seagate Data Recovery. To keep price down, ask about delaying turnaround time when getting quotes from any of these companies, and tell them that you're interested in a flat rate to decrease pricing.

The data recovery field can be tricky, and flat rate pricing is certainly new, but by sending your drive to a company with a good track record you'll avoid any pitfalls and should be able to cut the price of data recovery quite handily.