Even the best IT departments can’t rule every piece of office technology with an iron fist. People will always store important files on their desktops, which you may not have included in your backup system. External hard drives and NAS devices can slip through the cracks. Additionally, more corporate data is finding its way onto mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
That’s all well and good until something goes wrong and there aren’t any backups for it.
Those important unfinished documents could get wiped off their desktop by accident or if their computer needs to be rebuilt. Hard drives fail, life happens. Now what? You need those files back and quick! But is it possible to get back that data and how fast will it take and at what cost?
There is some hope to save your bacon — there are recovery companies out there that specialize in retrieving data from a failed hard drives and memory cards. The process will take a couple of weeks and depending on the size and type of the data can cost hundreds to thousands of bucks. It’s not cheap, but if the data is not recoverable in any other way and would be catastrophic to you if lost, a thousand dollars might be doable.
If you find yourself in this bind, we can connect you with a drive recovery service and even share some discount codes.
Here’s a general outline of the process:
- Drive recovery company creates a ticket to keep track of the whole process. You will be kept in the loop on communications.
- Failed hard drive will be extracted from the workstation/laptop by an IT resource and will need to be wrapped in protective packaging prepared for shipping.
- A return label will be generated from the drive recovery company to be put on the return box and it is usually shipped overnight. There is no charge for this part of the process.
- The drive recovery company will evaluate the hard drive usually in a few business days and give an estimate of how much data that they can recover and give a proposal and price to do it.
- Once you agree to the quote from the data recovery company for the work to be performed, then it will usually take 10-14 business days to complete the data recovery.
- The original hard drive will not be returned, but any recoverable data will be shipped to the client on an encrypted external hard drive. Instructions will also be shipped as well on how to open the external hard drive and view the data recovered.
Once you have the data recovered, we can discuss your next steps on preventing this from happening again, like enabling certain policies and systems to back up desktops or prevent random hardware from connecting to the network without your approval.