Ontrack Data Recovery
Overview
:Pros:
Fast service, recovery of faulty hard drives.Cons:
A bit pricey.Your hard drive crashed, no software application is able to recover your data, did you lose your valuable files forever? The truth is.. not really!
Your computer’s hard drive can hold 4TB of data. You store all your vacation photos, your child’s birthdays, your bank statements and all your office work on your hard drive. You feel safe and don’t feel the need to back up your data. After all, it’s a time-consuming process and nothing can happen to your new computer, right?
Wrong! Hard drive failure is a very common problem with today’s computers. Unlike today’s popular flash-based media that uses memory chips, hard drives still rely on their mechanical components. These can fail at any time – and if you didn’t back up your data or set up a RAID array, you are in trouble.
We encountered the same problems with one of our lab’s hard drives, one full of important files and data. We first tried to restore the data using different software recovery tools. These usually work if you have lost the master boot sector or if you have corrupted sectors on the drive. None of these software packages, including Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional software package, were able to restore any of the files. The drive was suffering from media corruption and minor internal mechanical problems.
We sent the drive to Ontrack for repair using their Data Recovery services. They have four labs located in the New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Washington D.C. metropolitan areas. After a few days we were sent a file listing the whole file structure of the corrupted hard drive. Using the Ontrack’s free VeriFile application, which runs on their website as an ActiveX application, we were able to view which files were recoverable and which were lost. VeriFile is a great and unique application that can be very useful when trying to recover your data. It’s a web-based software application that gives you a preview of what was restorable on your hard drive. It allows you to search the hard drive file structure for specific files or filter by several options including read-only, compressed and encrypted. In our case only a couple of files were lost.
Within a few more days we received an external hard drive containing all the recovered data. As an alternative we could have received the data on a set of several DVDs, but we opted for the more convenient external drive. All the files recovered were accessible. The total cost of this service was $1,500.
Ontrack Data Recovery did an impressive job at recovering our data. This can be valuable when you don’t have backup copies of your important files. We definitely recommend Data Recovery if you have vital information on your corrupted hard drive.
As a preventative measure we always recommend to do backups of your valuable files on a regular basis. If your computer is capable of a RAID array, it’s a great alternative to have two hard drives set up as RAID in mirroring mode.
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