[mythtvnz] Possibly off topic - HDD recovery

[criggie]

On 12/06/14 18:09, tortise wrote:
> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has 
> good expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few 
> hundred dollars will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in 
> question has about 10 click cycles on power up then spins down...
> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.

First thing is  STOP USING THE DRIVE!  RIGHT NOW!
If its dying, there's an unknown about how much life it has left. Since 
you're talking about proper data recovery, its worth doing everything 
possible to make the recovery a success.


- Bill shock -
Then, ask the end user to value their data - what's the cost of redoing 
a couple documents?
If its their complete life's photographic history, is it worth $200?  
$2000?   $20,000?
If its a bunch of recorded TV programmes, just buy some new drives and 
move on.

Everything is recoverable as long as the disk surface is intact.... 
Peter Gutman once recovered data from a fragment of a drive, using an 
optical technique. 
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html   (yes its old)

To answer your question, I used datalab once and they did the job 
nicely.  It cost a significant amount of money but that was years ago.  
There are a couple of other similar services now offering a "no data no 
fee" policy.


Finally, obligatory putting the boot in for lack of backups.  You know 
every other response will contain "if its important, it should have been 
backed up"   I personally hate cloud, but this could have been a 
solution, as is proper RAID, time machine, windows backup, a pen drive, 
paper copies, any number of safety nets.  Make sure the new storage is 
really backed up for next time.

-- 
Criggie

http://criggie.org.nz/