Data recovery in and around Boston

January 9, 2013 1:09 PM

Can anyone recommend a reputable and reliable Boston-area data recovery service that will provide a quote before sending in the drive?

I have a 2Tb HFS+ formatted drive that I need to have data recovered from (if possible). The drive is failing. I have a significant amount of experience recovering data (ddrescue and TSK are some of my best friends and I've done clean room surgery on a few occaisions), but my boss is irritated at the amount of time that it is taking and wants me to ship it off somewhere to have it done. I've never actually used any data recovery services before. I always hear about Techfusion(where data is never lost!) on NPR, but they've been unresponsive to my queries for a quote. Same goes for Disk Doctors. Any suggestions would be amazingly helpful.

posted by Cat Pie Hurts to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Is there any reason it has to be local? I used Drive Savers way back when I had a problem like this, and they were really great, though they were extremely expensive. They're located in California, they offered a quote ahead of time (IIRC), and they returned the data quickly. For all that money, shipping was handled by next-day air.
posted by deanc at 1:11 PM on January 9

Each, finding someone local to do this will be very difficult. I went through this last summer, an was willing to find someone as far away as Boston (I am in Maine).

No dice.

I did however go to ADR, who has local offices do their diagnostics for them, but the hard drive get shipped off to their facilities in Montana. Watch out, their local connections are often sketchy and not very well trained....

Other than the local connection part, it was an awesome experience and not nearly as expensive as we thought it was going to be.

I would contact them directly and bypass the local representative unless you know it is a reputable shop.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:29 PM on January 9

I used Drive Savers for a work-related incident in which a computer hosting a database (that somehow fell off the back-up client list I was supposed to be managing) had a HD failure. As deanc noted, they are really expensive, but they were relatively quick. It was several years ago, but I think it was only one or two days, but mind you this was only 5-10 GB worth of data.
posted by Debaser626 at 1:30 PM on January 9