03.21
We’ve all been there – your computer won’t boot, or you can’t access those important files you had stored on an external hard-drive for safe keeping. It always happens at the most inopportune times.
Many times it is a software issue, but every so often you run into a truly dead hard-drive with either severe file system corruption or worse mechanical issues. In those cases, you have to outsource the repair to a data recovery service.
The problem – the most well known of these services are out of California and require that you ship your hard drive across the country, wait, and then pay strangers a lot of money for sometimes less than stellar results.
A few years ago I ran across a locally (Atlanta) owned and operated data recovery service recommended by the Apple Store of all places. I took the recommendation with a grain of salt but I figured I would give them a shot. Since then I’ve sent countless hard drives their way for recovery, always with impressive results, for about half the price of the competition.
The company in question is Data Savers – http://www.datasaversllc.com/ – and they are the only place I recommend for data recovery.
There are several reasons I recommend Data Savers over all others, including but not limited to:
- They are local, so I can get a diagnostic the same day in many cases.
- The diagnostic and estimate are FREE.
- They are very fast.
- They are personable – you actually get to talk to and interact with the owner in most cases, Jon Yaeger gives you his personal diagnosis and tries to explain the problem in terms almost anyone can understand.
- If they try a recovery but fail (never happened to me, but possible with an extremely physically damaged hard drive), you only get charged $100.
- They are honest about the chances of a recovery – if they think the possibility of recovery is low, they will tell you, so you don’t waste $100.
- They are typically half the price of the competition, but the results are better than the more expensive options.
- They take the operating system into account during the recovery – for example, in the case of a boot drive, when possible they will try to give you back a bootable drive. I’ve turned in Mac laptops with damaged platters and received back a Mac laptop with a brand new hard-drive and the computer worked just like it did before it was turned in. No other data recovery service will even attempt that.
- Bottom line – they get results.
I highly recommend Data Savers, it is the only place I trust with my data (and my clients’ data). Check out their website – http://www.datasaversllc.com – or give them a call at 770-939-9363.
