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Are you looking for information about how to choose a data recovery company? There are literally hundreds of data recovery services you can call if your hard drive breaks or you press the delete key instead of the save key. If you need some help learning how to choose a data recovery service, this page provide some guidance about how to decide which data recovery service is right for you.
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Introduction
- When you are working on a project and you lose data, your first inclination may be to panic, and go with the first company you can find. However, taking some time to research and investigate to find the best data recovery service for your specific problem.
How Do You Pick a Data Recovery Service?
This video features an interview with John Christopher, Senior Data Recovery Engineer for DriveSavers.com. He talks about how you need to select a reputable data recovery service, especially for confidentiality reasons, and discusses the importance of determining whether or not recovering the data is actually worth the cost of the service.
Step 1: Company Credentials
- There are a few things to look for to help find the best data recovery company for your project and price range.
- Business History: How long has the company been around? A company that has been around less than five years may be a great company. However, the longer the company has been around, in general, the better the reputation and the better odds you will have to find a quality company.
- Services: The company you go with should have experience dealing with the type of data recovery problem you have. This could refer to a specific hard drive, a specific brand of hardware, or a specific type of data recovery issue.
- Clean rooms: According to sources, A class 100 Clean Room is the industry standard for data recovery projects.
Step 2: Match the Company to the Project
- Determine how essential your data is and how much you are willing to pay, and keep that in mind when researching companies. A forensic data recovery project, for a legal proceeding, will need different requirements than getting pictures from your niece's 1st birthday party. Generally, the more complex the data recovery, the more expensive.
Step 4: Check For Problems
- Check a company to see if there are any complaints on the company. The Better Business Bureau is a good place to start this search, but an online search can also be a useful tool.
Step 3: Get an Estimate
- Most companies provide a free estimate and rate quote after asking you some questions about your data recovery project. Compare several quotes to get a range of prices. If most companies say that they cannot recover your data, but one says they can, or if one company's prices are well above the others, be skeptical.
- Shop around.
- Get several estimates if time permits.