A heartfelt thanks to Alec and the team at Secure Data Recovery. We recently crashed a hard drive that had not been backed up for several months - containing numerous files that would truly be heartbreaking to lose.
After reading up on a few different places, I put in an inquiry and, within no time, Alec emailed me with the various levels of service that were offered. It took a few back and forth phone calls to determine which direction I should go, but I will say, they did not try and talk me into going with the most expensive option - they laid out all the timelines and helped me make a decision based on cost vs my patience and need for recovered data.
During the entire process, Alec was in constant contact updating me along the way. Moreover, their interface with the customer online allowed me to get updates as the process was going on. For someone like me, this type of communication is really helpful - especially when you are sitting on pins and needles wondering if they can recover the data at all.
Once the data was recovered, a technician walked me through the "Good" and "Bad" folders - my heart sank when i saw some of the documents in the bad folder, but what i learned from them was "bad" only meant they couldn't guarantee - and we successfully managed to open a large bulk of the bad files as well.
The technician (Greg) was willing to spend as much time as i wanted opening file after file making sure I was content before authorizing the completion of the job. I truly appreciated the fact that if the data was not recoverable, you are only out the charge of the diagnostics.
Some things to know - even though they have an Austin address, your drive is actually fedex'd to a clean room in OH. I mention this b/c one might think you just take it down the street and the work is done on site. But, as i said above, the facility in OH updates the progress 3-4 times per day (depending on the option you pick). Also, they only retrieve files - no applications or software. In this case, that was fine b/c we have a backup laptop with the software already on it - just don't want people to think they are getting an exact clone of your computer.
In the end, yes, we learned the valuable lesson of backing up often. I won't lie - it's not cheap, but as they say, some things are priceless and now that i have the files safely in hand, it was worth every penny.
Thank you Alec - for everything. Gonna be a happy weekend on this end. And while I loved the experience, I hope we never have to do it again! :)
Best,
David read more
