If you find yourself in need of data recovery service after losing half or more of your digital life, it’s good to realize that you have a choice of places to turn to when it comes to bringing your digital photo’s, your favorite movies and your carefully selected music collection back to life.

What’s also good to realize is that there’s a huge difference in reliability and business ethics uphold by these experts. While most of the time you will probably encounter honest and trustworthy professionals, it never hurts to take some precautions in order to avoid individuals that are more interested in taking your money than recovering your data.

Data recovery services

Not so long ago I saw an amusing video on YouTube in which two young men were testing a number of computer repair shops in Ohio. They “faked” a computer failure on their perfectly performing home desktop computer by opening the system case and carefully disconnecting the hard drive’s data flat cable. Then they closed the system case again so that they had a nice test case for the different computer repair shops that they wanted to visit.

Their goal was to call a number of computer repair service shops (I believe they went to 9 different shops in total) and compare how they measured up against one and other in dealing with the broken down system.

The different outcomes where simply mind-boggling.

In one shop the shop owner immediately opened up the computer case before their eyes. He immediately noticed the disconnected hard drive cable, plugged it in, powered up the computer to make sure that everything was working properly and sent his happy customers on the road without charging a penny.

The opposite extreme was a repair shop where the “customer” had to wait nearly three weeks before they got their computer back and was charged us$ 425.

There was also a company that didn’t find a fix for the defective pc, but they also didn’t charge the customer.

You may wonder how this all relates to data recovery services.

Well, the above YouTube video certainly isn’t unique. You will find other organizations and websites whose main purpose is to perform similar tests with “fake” failures or breakdowns, in order to investigate a variety of services. There are scenarios varying from simple plumbing problems like clogged drains all the way over to defective home cinema systems.

And some time ago I saw a television show where the crew were staging a broken down hard drive by simply deleting all the files on the drive. No hard disk format, no dropped partitions, no real hard drive crash, a simple delete of all the files on the drive.

As you may or may not know, there are a number of data recovery tools out there that are available to anyone.

Most of these tools offer a near 100% data recovery success rate when dealing with deleted files. Bringing back deleted files isn’t a very complex task, provided that there haven’t been a lot of data write operations on the drive after the files have been deleted.

So the main purpose of the consumer organization in the television show was to use this experiment and find out how the data recovery experts would compare against one and other.

As you can imagine those poor data recovery specialists, who didn’t have the slightest suspicion that they were being tested, charged prices varying from very reasonable amounts up to nearly us$ 2300 to bring back the deleted files.

If you ever find yourself in the position where you need to call a data recovery specialist, make sure do your due diligence, find out as much as you can about the company you’re about to call, and avoid being ripped off!

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