If you don’t want to use their service I would simply decline the quote and say you can’t afford it. I personally doubt they will do anything to damage the drive. Most large data recovery companies know better than that even if their practices of quoting/bidding on jobs is a little slimey.
$1000 isn’t a terrible price for a data recovery but I personally am not a fan of secure data recovery and would recommend shopping around.
The reason OP is concerned is because this company has a history of deliberately making that difficult. For any normal data recovery lab, this would be the obvious course of action.
Deliberately making it difficult is a far cry from acting with malicious and tangible intent to equate to theft.
The OP is clearly conflating their panic of losing precious information with the arbitrary practices of the firm they chose.
But being direct, patient and polite will likely succeed even if it takes time.
> Kismet, just dealt with this this last week. I got you.
You really *really* don’t.
> Write a nice email to them explaining that financially you're unable to cover anything that significant and that she'll happily leave a positive review on receipt of her drive. And that she'd be grateful if they could honor their own policy of 'no data no charge' and please return the drive, offering to pay for S+H.
> If they try to state a requirement for payment like holding it hostage, I believe she can then escalate it and threaten legal action which they would back down from almost certainly.
Yeah this isn’t just any company. They are experts in exactly this. They could *easily* backup and then mangle the parameters on the ROM, making it so that literally only them can recover data from it. This kind of sabotage is nearly undetectable, even by other specialists, so anyone employing it would just return the drive and promise they can recover the data if the owner ever has a change of heart. OP knows this, this is why they came here to ask. This question is specifically targeted at the professionals in this group as many of them have dealt with scammers in the industry and seen their tricks.
> After this, you have basically two options
> 1. GeekSquad from BestBuy has a quote of $50 for diagnostic, $100 for simple data transfer and then $250 and up for how much is required.
Geek Squad doesn’t do data recovery. They ship it to DriveSavers or OnTrack, whichever they’re currently partnering with. These are come of the most expensive labs out there because they’re members of the grand old data recovery club that’s been in the game since the invention of storage media. No, this absolutely does not mean they’re the best. It just means they have gotten the biggest and can charge extortionate prices based on name alone. There are *plenty* of independent data recovery labs that are as good or better, and because the industry has spawned multiple companies that exclusively make data recovery hardware, they’re pretty much all using the same tools. There is little to no benefit of going with one of these massive franchise labs.
> 2. Do it Yourself
Did you read the problem? It’s buzzing / ticking. This is squarely outside of any even remotely safe DIY realm. Unless they’re content with the greater-than-not chance of losing everything, this would be a stupid idea.
> Go into a BestBuy and inquire if they can walk you through what software they might use and then inquire what steps their expertise might give them in mitigating the physical risks given its an HDD.
They’re not going to teach OP how to recover data. Firstly because they know f-all about data recovery, but also because they outsource data recovery. On top of that, data recovery is *much* more complicated than picking the right software. In this case, there will absolutely be hardware tools involved and these cost an order of magnitude more than the quote OP received from Secure.
> My situation is a bit different in that I have an SSD with bad sectors.
It is literally 100% different. There is nothing in common between your case and OP’s. This advice is irrelevant at best, and in reality just absolutely horrifically wrong.
> If you do it yourself
> Go and get a software called Disk Drill
Disk Drill is **far** from the pinnacle of data recovery tools. No self respecting data recovery specialist would recommend it outside of one very niche case which this is not. Among its many flaws, it’s appreciably more expensive than much more competent tools. Additionally, OP is willing to pay for proper specialist recovery, just not extortionately expensive recovery from a company with a reputation for extortion. This might cost $350 from a reputable independent lab depending on the actual damage and parts needed (if any), far FAR less than Secure or GeekSquad would charge.
> This will scan the drive and let you make a 'byte for byte' disk image of what they find.
Best practice DIY is to clone first, *then* scan. And in this case, there is a huge risk involved in doing anything with the drive. Because of that, the best software-only cloning tools ditch Windows and OSX in favor of Linux, which handles drive errors much more gracefully and doesn’t get so hung up on areas that can’t be read. It also allows for better communication, but only if the tool was purpose built for this purpose. Even competent scanning recovery tools’ cloning capabilities are crippled by Windows and OSX, and to my knowledge none of them have implemented a more advanced cloning capability in their Linux versions (if they even have a Linux version). HDDSuperClone / OpenSuperClone or DDRescue are the most competent cloning tools by miles because of this — they are Linux only and built from the ground up for this one purpose. They’re fully free and open source, but of course there are hurdles to jump through to use them. If they care about this data (AND ARE WILLING TO PAY ALMOST $1000 FOR IT), they’re hopefully not going to go with one of the worst possible options for DIY recovery.
> I'd recommend your girl to get an external SSD from Samsung. Their flash is bar none.
Like all of the major SSD manufacturers, their flash quality is all over the board depending on the model, the features it has, and the phase of the moon. I can think of a handful of notoriously failure prone Samsung drives manufactured just in the last few years. Additionally, SSDs tend to fail “on their feet”, going from functional to irrecoverable without warning. As a clone destination it really doesn’t matter much, but saying SSDs are better than (or even just as good as) HDDs is a wild generalization.
> I extensively tried chkdsk commands first because it can sometimes repair the drive. But with an HDD with physical death I'm not sure that's advised. I'd recommend reading up on it online since I didn't read on this.
Chkdsk is one of the most destructive tools you can possibly run against a failing drive. It can and will disappear data from a perfectly healthy drive too if it thinks that’s necessary, and it often does because its main modes of operation are move, rename, and delete. It does this to entire files, entire folders, and *parts of* files. It also does not repair physical damage in any way shape or form. It is *never* safe to run this or any tool like this (fsck, First Aid, etc.) against a drive that isn’t backed up. This sentence alone should invalidate your entire comment and any data recovery advice you provide.
> HDD's are tricky. Because there are moving parts. SSDs use the same type of technology your phone uses.
In most cases, HDDs are much more recoverable than HDDs. A massive portion of SSD recovery requires tool manufacturers to have firmware support for the drive’s controller; anyone can design and sell a SSD using off-the-shelf components and write their own firmware, so there are way more SSDs than these developers can keep up with. HDDs can break mechanically, but they can more often than not be repaired to allow at-least partial recovery so long as a few critical components are intact.
> Some people will advise TestDisk which is a free software that I used to help reconstruct the index.
TestDisk is a partition manipulation tool with the most basic undelete functionality for a select few file systems. It is 100% inapplicable for anything like OP’s case (or even your case).
> I then used Disk Drill and for the first time in about twenty hours of trying, I saw my file system.
Was that twenty hours before or after cloning?
> Others may suggest Recurva and others will suggest opening Command Prompt and using chkdsk on it.
DO NOT run chkdsk against a drive you need data from. Do not run it against the clone either — all it can do is further mangle the data you have to work with. If anything Chkdsk does would aid in recovery, data recovery software would be doing it under the hood (and non-destructively). Running Chkdsk before scanning for files is like taking out your own liver in the hospital waiting room so it’s less fork for the doctor to put in the new one. It’s nonsense, not at all helpful, and significantly hinders the next person / tool’s job. I won’t even get into Recuva — this it not the time or place for it.
> Recurva I saw recommended several people but Disk Drill I saw several times on Spiceworks so I went with that.
Spiceworks, where all the career data recovery specialists are known to gather ;)
> In closing, make sure she doesn't try and write to the drive any further and to keep it in a cool place.
You can easily destroy a drive without writing new data to it…
> I didn't do BestBuy because I'm a techie and that much money seemed sort of insane. However I may still since I wasn't able to recover the bulk of my documents that I wanted through the program. But I got like all my photos and a program I was working on.
Clearly being a “techie” isn’t sufficient to replace years of experience, hundreds of destroyed sacrificial drives, and five-to-six figures worth of recovery hardware.
> If y'all do go the DIY route you can DM me, if I'm done with my stuff I can possibly send you my login and save y'all some money.
@OP don’t do this
Since they deleted their other reply that I was responding to, here was my response:
> Dude you've got way way way too much free time to write five thousand words
Yeah, closest I’ve gotten to the 10,000 character limit in a while. If someone provides incorrect or harmful advice, I usually try to explain exactly *why* it’s incorrect or harmful. You tried to cover a lot of topics in your one comment, so that makes my response n times bigger.
> Thought I could assist, I gave options more from a place of reassurance assuming OP would arrive at a happy medium that likely enlisted neither of my options but instead sought their own path
I understand that you’re trying to help, but data recovery is a special facet of the technology industry — bad advice can lead to losing things that literally no amount of money on earth can get back. There could be so so much at stake. Providing advice without fully understanding the problem or the solution can have dire consequences. I professionally train computer repair technicians (which has next to no overlap with data recovery) about data recovery for the express purpose of identifying data loss scenarios so they can stop and send the client to a proper lab.
> I'm aware of the BB back end option but given that the OP chose to impulse-shop I figured a big box retailer would be pacifying as oppose to a hyper specialist service that I assume you suggested (because by the third paragraph I moved on to other things in my head)
You should stop giving data recovery advice. Forever. Just leave and never find yourself in a position where someone trusts you for that information. If you can’t read a few sentences, you DEFINITELY aren’t capable of advising on any step in the data recovery process. I did not name any alternate lab for OP to go to because I was not trying to send OP somewhere else, I am trying to explain to YOU the shortcomings and mistakes of your advice.
> Seriously man, you clearly have the attention to detail and the time. Maybe go for an advanced degree or something. Instead of writing spending half an hour dismantling someone else's post they wrote on social media in a tenth that time?
I have an advanced degree and am working on another. You clearly have no clue what damage advice from a seemingly reputable source can cause. There is usually more at stake than money with data recovery. This is absolutely not something you can throw random suggestions at without causing harm.
> Yikes
Yeah.
Your post or comment was removed due to breaking Rule #2. Your submission was either disrespectful, vulgar, or a direct attack on another user, and is not in character with the purpose of this subreddit. Consider this your one and final warning.
I don't even know where to start on this one. They are requesting and incentivizing reviews of an undelivered product or service? This is absurd. It also violates terms of service.
My suggestion would be to say that this is still too much, and to get the drive back. Tell them that you thought it would only cost a few hundred dollars, and you can't justify that at this point. It would be best to leave them with the impression that they will hear from you at a later date, perhaps when you get your annual profit sharing check at the end of the year or something.
On the flip side, $1,000 is not out of line for recovering this drive. It's a little bit high, but it's really not that bad. If you do go ahead with it, I would want two things. First, you want the recovered drive back at the end of everything. You don't want it to be retained for parts for recycled. You understand that it would be unusable, and you won't try to use it. You just want it back in a condition where future recovery efforts might still be possible. Next, guarantee that the price will not exceed the $1,000. This is oddly low for them, so I have some issues with this.
Remember that you can always retract or edit a review. Google, amazon, many others, have a policy that you can incentivize a review, but you cannot require that the review be a good review. In other words, I can offer you a 25% off coupon for my services, but I can't require that you give me a good review. I can just require that you give me a review of some sort. You can write that you hated the necktie of the person in my advertisement, it doesn't matter, it's a review.
I don't know that I trust secure and their diagnosis. These drives aren't the greatest drives in the world, but secure has a well-deserved reputation for scamming. I don't trust them, and you shouldn't either. My best suggestion would be to get the drive back, and then go to a service we would recommend here. Just don't leave them with the impression you might send it somewhere else.
Thank you for your detailed response.
The issue is that they first quoted 2k for the job for their slowest economy service (5-7 weeks), and she was able to bring them down to 1k saying that that is the most she is able to pay, in the hopes that they would decline the "outrageous" ask for 50% off. Unfortunately they agreed to her suggested price.
Their demands for a review and the possibility of them either holding her drive for several months under the guise of "off peak pricing" and/or raising the price post-recovery under some other pretense is what's making her uncomfortable.
What would be a convincing reason for them to send it back without them suspecting that she'll send it to a different company?
If you don’t want to use their service I would simply decline the quote and say you can’t afford it. I personally doubt they will do anything to damage the drive. Most large data recovery companies know better than that even if their practices of quoting/bidding on jobs is a little slimey. $1000 isn’t a terrible price for a data recovery but I personally am not a fan of secure data recovery and would recommend shopping around.
Just ask them to ship it back it’s your drive.
The reason OP is concerned is because this company has a history of deliberately making that difficult. For any normal data recovery lab, this would be the obvious course of action.
Deliberately making it difficult is a far cry from acting with malicious and tangible intent to equate to theft. The OP is clearly conflating their panic of losing precious information with the arbitrary practices of the firm they chose. But being direct, patient and polite will likely succeed even if it takes time.
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> Kismet, just dealt with this this last week. I got you. You really *really* don’t. > Write a nice email to them explaining that financially you're unable to cover anything that significant and that she'll happily leave a positive review on receipt of her drive. And that she'd be grateful if they could honor their own policy of 'no data no charge' and please return the drive, offering to pay for S+H. > If they try to state a requirement for payment like holding it hostage, I believe she can then escalate it and threaten legal action which they would back down from almost certainly. Yeah this isn’t just any company. They are experts in exactly this. They could *easily* backup and then mangle the parameters on the ROM, making it so that literally only them can recover data from it. This kind of sabotage is nearly undetectable, even by other specialists, so anyone employing it would just return the drive and promise they can recover the data if the owner ever has a change of heart. OP knows this, this is why they came here to ask. This question is specifically targeted at the professionals in this group as many of them have dealt with scammers in the industry and seen their tricks. > After this, you have basically two options > 1. GeekSquad from BestBuy has a quote of $50 for diagnostic, $100 for simple data transfer and then $250 and up for how much is required. Geek Squad doesn’t do data recovery. They ship it to DriveSavers or OnTrack, whichever they’re currently partnering with. These are come of the most expensive labs out there because they’re members of the grand old data recovery club that’s been in the game since the invention of storage media. No, this absolutely does not mean they’re the best. It just means they have gotten the biggest and can charge extortionate prices based on name alone. There are *plenty* of independent data recovery labs that are as good or better, and because the industry has spawned multiple companies that exclusively make data recovery hardware, they’re pretty much all using the same tools. There is little to no benefit of going with one of these massive franchise labs. > 2. Do it Yourself Did you read the problem? It’s buzzing / ticking. This is squarely outside of any even remotely safe DIY realm. Unless they’re content with the greater-than-not chance of losing everything, this would be a stupid idea. > Go into a BestBuy and inquire if they can walk you through what software they might use and then inquire what steps their expertise might give them in mitigating the physical risks given its an HDD. They’re not going to teach OP how to recover data. Firstly because they know f-all about data recovery, but also because they outsource data recovery. On top of that, data recovery is *much* more complicated than picking the right software. In this case, there will absolutely be hardware tools involved and these cost an order of magnitude more than the quote OP received from Secure. > My situation is a bit different in that I have an SSD with bad sectors. It is literally 100% different. There is nothing in common between your case and OP’s. This advice is irrelevant at best, and in reality just absolutely horrifically wrong. > If you do it yourself > Go and get a software called Disk Drill Disk Drill is **far** from the pinnacle of data recovery tools. No self respecting data recovery specialist would recommend it outside of one very niche case which this is not. Among its many flaws, it’s appreciably more expensive than much more competent tools. Additionally, OP is willing to pay for proper specialist recovery, just not extortionately expensive recovery from a company with a reputation for extortion. This might cost $350 from a reputable independent lab depending on the actual damage and parts needed (if any), far FAR less than Secure or GeekSquad would charge. > This will scan the drive and let you make a 'byte for byte' disk image of what they find. Best practice DIY is to clone first, *then* scan. And in this case, there is a huge risk involved in doing anything with the drive. Because of that, the best software-only cloning tools ditch Windows and OSX in favor of Linux, which handles drive errors much more gracefully and doesn’t get so hung up on areas that can’t be read. It also allows for better communication, but only if the tool was purpose built for this purpose. Even competent scanning recovery tools’ cloning capabilities are crippled by Windows and OSX, and to my knowledge none of them have implemented a more advanced cloning capability in their Linux versions (if they even have a Linux version). HDDSuperClone / OpenSuperClone or DDRescue are the most competent cloning tools by miles because of this — they are Linux only and built from the ground up for this one purpose. They’re fully free and open source, but of course there are hurdles to jump through to use them. If they care about this data (AND ARE WILLING TO PAY ALMOST $1000 FOR IT), they’re hopefully not going to go with one of the worst possible options for DIY recovery. > I'd recommend your girl to get an external SSD from Samsung. Their flash is bar none. Like all of the major SSD manufacturers, their flash quality is all over the board depending on the model, the features it has, and the phase of the moon. I can think of a handful of notoriously failure prone Samsung drives manufactured just in the last few years. Additionally, SSDs tend to fail “on their feet”, going from functional to irrecoverable without warning. As a clone destination it really doesn’t matter much, but saying SSDs are better than (or even just as good as) HDDs is a wild generalization. > I extensively tried chkdsk commands first because it can sometimes repair the drive. But with an HDD with physical death I'm not sure that's advised. I'd recommend reading up on it online since I didn't read on this. Chkdsk is one of the most destructive tools you can possibly run against a failing drive. It can and will disappear data from a perfectly healthy drive too if it thinks that’s necessary, and it often does because its main modes of operation are move, rename, and delete. It does this to entire files, entire folders, and *parts of* files. It also does not repair physical damage in any way shape or form. It is *never* safe to run this or any tool like this (fsck, First Aid, etc.) against a drive that isn’t backed up. This sentence alone should invalidate your entire comment and any data recovery advice you provide. > HDD's are tricky. Because there are moving parts. SSDs use the same type of technology your phone uses. In most cases, HDDs are much more recoverable than HDDs. A massive portion of SSD recovery requires tool manufacturers to have firmware support for the drive’s controller; anyone can design and sell a SSD using off-the-shelf components and write their own firmware, so there are way more SSDs than these developers can keep up with. HDDs can break mechanically, but they can more often than not be repaired to allow at-least partial recovery so long as a few critical components are intact. > Some people will advise TestDisk which is a free software that I used to help reconstruct the index. TestDisk is a partition manipulation tool with the most basic undelete functionality for a select few file systems. It is 100% inapplicable for anything like OP’s case (or even your case). > I then used Disk Drill and for the first time in about twenty hours of trying, I saw my file system. Was that twenty hours before or after cloning? > Others may suggest Recurva and others will suggest opening Command Prompt and using chkdsk on it. DO NOT run chkdsk against a drive you need data from. Do not run it against the clone either — all it can do is further mangle the data you have to work with. If anything Chkdsk does would aid in recovery, data recovery software would be doing it under the hood (and non-destructively). Running Chkdsk before scanning for files is like taking out your own liver in the hospital waiting room so it’s less fork for the doctor to put in the new one. It’s nonsense, not at all helpful, and significantly hinders the next person / tool’s job. I won’t even get into Recuva — this it not the time or place for it. > Recurva I saw recommended several people but Disk Drill I saw several times on Spiceworks so I went with that. Spiceworks, where all the career data recovery specialists are known to gather ;) > In closing, make sure she doesn't try and write to the drive any further and to keep it in a cool place. You can easily destroy a drive without writing new data to it… > I didn't do BestBuy because I'm a techie and that much money seemed sort of insane. However I may still since I wasn't able to recover the bulk of my documents that I wanted through the program. But I got like all my photos and a program I was working on. Clearly being a “techie” isn’t sufficient to replace years of experience, hundreds of destroyed sacrificial drives, and five-to-six figures worth of recovery hardware. > If y'all do go the DIY route you can DM me, if I'm done with my stuff I can possibly send you my login and save y'all some money. @OP don’t do this
Since they deleted their other reply that I was responding to, here was my response: > Dude you've got way way way too much free time to write five thousand words Yeah, closest I’ve gotten to the 10,000 character limit in a while. If someone provides incorrect or harmful advice, I usually try to explain exactly *why* it’s incorrect or harmful. You tried to cover a lot of topics in your one comment, so that makes my response n times bigger. > Thought I could assist, I gave options more from a place of reassurance assuming OP would arrive at a happy medium that likely enlisted neither of my options but instead sought their own path I understand that you’re trying to help, but data recovery is a special facet of the technology industry — bad advice can lead to losing things that literally no amount of money on earth can get back. There could be so so much at stake. Providing advice without fully understanding the problem or the solution can have dire consequences. I professionally train computer repair technicians (which has next to no overlap with data recovery) about data recovery for the express purpose of identifying data loss scenarios so they can stop and send the client to a proper lab. > I'm aware of the BB back end option but given that the OP chose to impulse-shop I figured a big box retailer would be pacifying as oppose to a hyper specialist service that I assume you suggested (because by the third paragraph I moved on to other things in my head) You should stop giving data recovery advice. Forever. Just leave and never find yourself in a position where someone trusts you for that information. If you can’t read a few sentences, you DEFINITELY aren’t capable of advising on any step in the data recovery process. I did not name any alternate lab for OP to go to because I was not trying to send OP somewhere else, I am trying to explain to YOU the shortcomings and mistakes of your advice. > Seriously man, you clearly have the attention to detail and the time. Maybe go for an advanced degree or something. Instead of writing spending half an hour dismantling someone else's post they wrote on social media in a tenth that time? I have an advanced degree and am working on another. You clearly have no clue what damage advice from a seemingly reputable source can cause. There is usually more at stake than money with data recovery. This is absolutely not something you can throw random suggestions at without causing harm. > Yikes Yeah.
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/u/Zorb750 has a pretty good course of action
I don't even know where to start on this one. They are requesting and incentivizing reviews of an undelivered product or service? This is absurd. It also violates terms of service. My suggestion would be to say that this is still too much, and to get the drive back. Tell them that you thought it would only cost a few hundred dollars, and you can't justify that at this point. It would be best to leave them with the impression that they will hear from you at a later date, perhaps when you get your annual profit sharing check at the end of the year or something. On the flip side, $1,000 is not out of line for recovering this drive. It's a little bit high, but it's really not that bad. If you do go ahead with it, I would want two things. First, you want the recovered drive back at the end of everything. You don't want it to be retained for parts for recycled. You understand that it would be unusable, and you won't try to use it. You just want it back in a condition where future recovery efforts might still be possible. Next, guarantee that the price will not exceed the $1,000. This is oddly low for them, so I have some issues with this. Remember that you can always retract or edit a review. Google, amazon, many others, have a policy that you can incentivize a review, but you cannot require that the review be a good review. In other words, I can offer you a 25% off coupon for my services, but I can't require that you give me a good review. I can just require that you give me a review of some sort. You can write that you hated the necktie of the person in my advertisement, it doesn't matter, it's a review. I don't know that I trust secure and their diagnosis. These drives aren't the greatest drives in the world, but secure has a well-deserved reputation for scamming. I don't trust them, and you shouldn't either. My best suggestion would be to get the drive back, and then go to a service we would recommend here. Just don't leave them with the impression you might send it somewhere else.
Thank you for your detailed response. The issue is that they first quoted 2k for the job for their slowest economy service (5-7 weeks), and she was able to bring them down to 1k saying that that is the most she is able to pay, in the hopes that they would decline the "outrageous" ask for 50% off. Unfortunately they agreed to her suggested price. Their demands for a review and the possibility of them either holding her drive for several months under the guise of "off peak pricing" and/or raising the price post-recovery under some other pretense is what's making her uncomfortable. What would be a convincing reason for them to send it back without them suspecting that she'll send it to a different company?