While I back up online and offsite due to a complicated failure I was without a complete image of…read morenearly 6TB data back to 1992. Gillware and their team are true professionals. Did an online intake, received a phone call Christmas Eve morning to confirm everything. Great updates and proposal before providing a method of payment. By 30 Dec my replacement drive with 99.999% of the recovered data was in the way back to me. Do know if they needed clean rooms or the level of effort needed or the time required. Just know they took a inop drive and got the data off. Just like an lawyer, dentist, pilot or doctor sometimes you pay for experience and in my opinion it was worth for 30 years worth of files. While I hope to never need their services again, they are the only ones I would trust my digital footprint too. While not inexpensive you are paying for their knowledge and experience. If is was so simple and fast then you could do it yourself or maybe hire the "neighborhood geek" or you could pay the experts to professionally recover your important data. While my choice may not be the best for everyone glad I paid Gillware to do it. However, we will be installing a RAID 5 NAS as part of our new 3-2-1 back up plan.

Take it from a software engineer, you'll wanna read this review before you go with this company…read more You are about to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in your repair, its worth your time to spend a few minutes reading this review. I have included email quotes from the company in my review too Summary: Gillware is very good at what they do, but they will take as much of your money as possible even if its an easy fix. I ended up paying them over $550 plus $28 shipping for a 20 minute fix, and I didn't get all the files I expected. The good: -They uploaded the recovered files to their website so I could preview the file NAMES (this does not mean you can open / download the files) before purchase, which was very valuable to me. It was nice seeing exactly what files were recovered before I put my money down -They are protective of your data once they recover it: once they ship your recovered data back to you on an external hard drive, they keep a backup on site in case it gets lost in the mail or if you need to access their backup -They are responsive and reasonable to deal with. The website is fast and easy to use The bad: The file previewer is misleading, to say the least: For me, it showed that there were 5155 photos recovered (.jpg, .png, etc.). I was very excited to hear that they recovered that many of my personal photos, but when I got the drive back, there were really only 900 personal photos that I took with my camera which were recovered. The rest of the 5155 quoted photos were SYSTEM RELATED PHOTOS. What this means is they are images that you don't care about, images that came with your software, operating system, or applications, icons, etc. I recommend you don't let the file previewer fool you, and realize that there are a TON of system generated files (which show up as images: .jpg, .png formats) which will be recovered. When I spent my money, I thought I was getting 5155 photos, or about $0.10 per photo which was worth it to me. When I found out that 4000+ of those photos were system generated, this was slightly annoying. The worst part of this is that Gillware did not warn me about this at all before taking my money. They should have cautioned me saying: "hey, even though it says 5155 photos were recovered, most of those are system generated photos / items that you probably don't care about". But they didn't and the website doesn't warn me of this trap either Once Gillware finished recovering my data, I asked them what was wrong with the drive. I was surprised to find out what a simple fix this was for them. All they had to do was move some of the harddrive heads and reinstall the firmware on the harddrive. Here is what they said: "During the evaluation the engineers have determined that the firmware on the drive (the brain on how the drive works) had died and we had essentially replaced/repaired the firmware to ensure that the drive knew was it was doing. From there we had also released the read/write heads that were stuck to ensure that we can read the data off of your drive successfully." "Some cases are easier for our engineers to complete the recovery during the evaluation process rather than sending it back into the lab for further work if the customer decides to proceed. Essentially we are taking a gamble that you will agree to move forward with purchasing your data by working on it ahead of time. This route saves us and customers on wait time." In english, this means that it took them less than 1 hour to recover my data, and the drive didn't even need professional LAB work to be repaired. They charged me $550 plus $28 shipping for the recovery operation. Meaning, I paid them $550 per hour, and they didn't even need to send the drive to the lab. That is RIDICULOUS! They don't need $550 / hour for non-lab work. And I honestly don't even think it took them 1 hour to fix my drive. Most likely 20 minutes, if that I know that $550 is cheap for data recovery, but if its only a 20 minute repair, you would think that they would provide a discount.