so picture this you're firing up your pc for another day of hard work or slacking
off at work and nothing happens i mean the computer turns on but instead of
getting to the operating system you get some kind of recurring error message
about your storage then it hits you your hard drive or your
SSD is dead and the data is about as
accessible as the ark of the covenant but all might not be lost you can still
send your drive off to a data recovery service so that your tax documents
personal photos or saved games aren't lost to the ether but how do you even
get started with that well today we're going to tell you how and we'd also like
to thank our friends over at drive savers for sponsoring this video
first things first if you use a professional service it probably won't
take a super long time to get your data back if it is indeed recoverable but it
also won't be a matter of a couple of hours before you can breathe again
either if you can afford rush service and your recovery job ends up not being very
complicated it could be turned around in as little as a day but you may also end
up waiting around a week so keep your expectations reasonable if you only need
logical data recovery the process tends to be quicker so this is when a drive is
still in good shape physically but you've lost your data due to something
like a problem with the operating system or an accidental format however if you
have a physical issue like a head crash you might be waiting around for longer
since they'll probably have to take your drive apart possibly in a clean room
environment and repair the drive just enough so that there can be a chance
that you can get some of that data back but how do these processes work let's
first talk about logical data recovery which for example you might need if
there's a problem with the master file table which serves as kind of like an
index or a record of the physical locations that each file occupies on
your disk issues with the mft can result in your
computer simply not knowing where to find the data even though it's still on
the disk so that can often still be recovered
with tools that use strategies like bypassing corrupted file system
infrastructure or scanning the data manually and then putting it back
together using signatures that are common to certain file types physical
recovery is obviously more complicated of course if a drive is very badly
physically damaged there might not be anything even the best data recovery
companies can do but if that isn't the case recovery companies do have a
variety of tricks up their sleeves it could be repairing or replacing the
drive circuit board you could move the disk platters to a new drive a tricky
proposition because of how close the read and write head has to be to the
platter's surface and even a drive that suffered a head crash where the head
actually impacts the disc it can partially be salvaged by
physically moving the head out of the way before attempting to read any data
on whatever good parts of the platter are left though it should be noted that
the area directly under the crash is often unrecoverable if we're talking
about ssds the company might actually have to remove the nand flash that
stores the data and transplant it to a new board with the original controller
chip and then for corrupted firmware which also counts as physical failure by
the way the data recovery company might have to repair or rebuild the firmware
to access your data which can add additional time and sometimes data can
be unrecoverable even if there's no physical damage as is the case of a hard
drive that's overwritten with zeros or an SSD where the trim command has been
run you can learn more about those things here and here
now that you have an idea of how it works how do you go about picking a service provider well one thing to keep
in mind is that reputable places will often provide some kind of results-based
payment structure you ever see those lawyer commercials where they say you
don't pay if we don't win well a good data recovery place also shouldn't be
billing you if they can't get your data back so look out if they try to charge
you large amounts of money that you'll be on the hook for regardless of whether
anything is actually recovered and on that note make sure you get a quote in
writing before signing anything also make sure that your provider has
comprehensive security protocols in place they should be protecting your
data and getting rid of any copies that they have once the recovery process is
complete and of course like anything else read reviews and make sure there
aren't an inordinate number of complaints about a particular company
because they took two months and all they could recover was a big folder of
Linus face memes for example not that i speak from personal
experience thanks to drive savers for sponsoring this video they're a san
francisco bay area based company that's been around since 1985 and is authorized
by all the major drive manufacturers they offer data recovery on all kinds of
devices hard drives ssds raid arrays of
the aforementioned nasa's thumb drives sd cards if it holds data they can save
it they even do phones all their operations are in a single data recovery
lab and their data recovery advisors are available 24 7 with access to their
engineers at all times meaning fast turnarounds if you're trying to save
critical data they have the largest iso 5 certified data recovery clean room on
earth and they offer advanced quotes free evaluation and free shipping if
they don't recover any data you don't get charged so if you want to be as
close to certain as you can be that you're going to get your data back send
it to drive savers first before you send it somewhere else that might attempt a
recovery and mess it up so even they can't get it at that point that's
actually something we should have mentioned in the main body of the video one of the key important things for data
recovery is if you don't know what you're doing don't do
anything send it to a pro anyway use the code tech wiki to get five percent off
drive saver services at the link below thanks for watching guys like dislike
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