Question Data Recovery

[Rock21]

I have a hard drive that I can't access. I'm looking at Data Recovery. there are two ways I can go. One is to ship it to someone or a company and pay them for whatever their service is or download software. and pay them for their service. my question is which is better? what is the percentage? rate of recovering all data? and the second issue is what stops someone. more on the software from stealing or taking my data?

 

[World Changer]

I have a hard drive that I can't access. I'm looking at Data Recovery. there are two ways I can go. One is to ship it to someone or a company and pay them for whatever their service is or download software. and pay them for their service. my question is which is better? what is the percentage? rate of recovering all data? and the second issue is what stops someone. more on the software from stealing or taking my data?

I too am in the process of recovering data from 30+ year old 3.5-inch diskettes and from a Bernoulli Box 90 MB disk, also from 30 years ago. I recently attended a Vintage Computer Federation (VCF) event here near Chicago, and met a Bernoulli tech, who I met on the VCF forums online. Try out that forum too, not just Tom's Hardware. You may also get good advice from techs that post there. The VCF tech easily recovered my Bernoulli Box disk database files, which I thought were too fragile after so much time, but I'm still in the process of getting the database files recovered from the 3.5-inch disks.

 

[World Changer]

I have a hard drive that I can't access. I'm looking at Data Recovery. there are two ways I can go. One is to ship it to someone or a company and pay them for whatever their service is or download software. and pay them for their service. my question is which is better? what is the percentage? rate of recovering all data? and the second issue is what stops someone. more on the software from stealing or taking my data?

P.S. I considered going to a data recovery company, but my database was unique though now that I have multiple copies!!!) so I didn't want to risk simply sending it somewhere, being so fragile, etc. They also charge around $175-$200/hour. Also security scans at airports might damage fragile files. So, I was willing to drive my databases to faraway companies. But the VCF event was luckily nearby and the tech I met on the forums arrived here and recovered my data free of charge (though I gave him a nice gift!).

What type of data are you trying to copy/recover? How old is it?

 

[USAFRet]

I have a hard drive that I can't access. I'm looking at Data Recovery. there are two ways I can go. One is to ship it to someone or a company and pay them for whatever their service is or download software. and pay them for their service. my question is which is better? what is the percentage? rate of recovering all data? and the second issue is what stops someone. more on the software from stealing or taking my data?

There can be no "percentage of success". Anything from 0% to 100%.

Stealing or taking our data is mostly a non-issue. Unless you have the plans for a working cold fusion reactor, or nudes of a famous person....no one cares.


The way to prevent ALL of this is with a good backup routine.
If the physical drive dies, you simply put in a new one, recover the data from your backup, and throw the dead drive away.