Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Disk Disaster Update

8 Comments

So I got the estimate from the recovery company.

The good news: They can recover the files.

The bad news: There will be no directory tree or filenames, just numbered files with extensions.

The worse news: They want a minimum of $1700. That’s if I’m willing to wait weeks. More if I want it sooner, up to five grand$2700.

So have to find another solution. I could probably live without the file names, given that I’m primarily looking for mailboxes, and the virtual Windows machine file.

8 thoughts on “Disk Disaster Update”

  1. Hey Rand, go to bleepingcomputer.com. That is where I go to, if I have computer problems. They have a message. Sign up, and create a post. Tell them about your computer. Somebody will come on, and help you. They offer all kinds of help. You name it, and they will help you. The front page of their website has news articles.

    You should go there, and check it out.

  2. Rand buddy, No backups of the data available? If not get a NAS – easy and safe backups.

  3. I had a similar experience about 23 years ago, when the main hard drive on my KST desktop physically destroyed itself, the actuator arms driving the read/write heads into the platters and crumbling them. It cost $2,000 back then (when it was real money!), but a company was able to recover my e-mail and a great many of my other files. They were just numbered, as you note, and I spent an ungodly amount of time resurrecting them. But it saved irreplaceable company data.

    Back when Dana Andrews was with Boeing, he told me about their IT security people challenging him and his reports to try to make hard drive data unrecoverable. Dana’s team first put a Word document on a hard drive. Then they disassembled the hard drive, broke the platters up with a hammer, and dragged a strong magnet over the whole mess. The IT people took the debris, and some time later came back with a perfect digital copy of the Word document. I doubt that they had a huge budget for the IT security department, but they had talent.

    So in summary: For $2,000 spent 23 years ago, I could get my data back from a destroyed hard drive, and maybe 20 years ago Boeing’s IT security team could do and even harder task with little effort, and today it would take $1,600 to recover your drive data – but the FBI, with an annual budget of $9,748,829,000, can’t find Hillary’s or Hunter’s e-mails.

    You should send Christopher Wray the name of the recovery company you found. I’m sure he’d really appreciate it.

  4. I also had a similar issue 6 years ago where I lost like 20 years of archived data. Really annoying.

    1. This kind of thing has been happening ever since Moses started down from Mount Sinai with the twenty commandments.

  5. While I haven’t had cause to use them in about 15 years, there were at that time some quite good ‘trashed disk’ recovery tools. I don’t know what would be the current suggestion, but it’s mostly a matter of tedious work… Assuming the data you want hasn’t been completely overwritten, anyway. If you’re trying to recover data that has been written over, that price seems… not unreasonable.

Comments are closed.