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Data Recovery Pricing

Don’t Wait for a Quote

While other data recovery companies will only quote you a price range, Drive Rescue operates an upfront pricing policy. We will give you an exact price over the phone or email for most data loss situations - even before we even see your drive.

This way, you know what you’ll pay before we begin work. The exact price depends on what type of recovery you need, which tends to fall into one of three categories:

How Can We Give You a Price Before Even Seeing the Drive?

Storage devices are not that different from other technology products in that certain models experience commonalities in their failure modes. We deal with brands such Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Micron, Lite-On Samsung and HGST on a daily basis. More likely than not, we’ve already recovered from a device similar to yours before. Therefore, using our experience and after a short few questions about your device - we believe it’s only fair that you’re provided with a recovery price upfront and not just a price range. Our reputation is important to us. The price we quote you over the phone is usually the price we stick to.

It’s nice to know where you stand...

Other data recovery companies also have a fair idea of how much your data recovery job is really going to cost. However, they won’t divulge this to you over the phone or thru email. Instead, they will give you a “price range” and request that you send the device to their premises. Once the device is in their pocession you automatically become part of an elaborate sales process - a process which once entered into many customers don’t feel comfortable with.

From Basic to Advanced Data Recovery

So, what is the difference between Basic, Standard and Advanced recovery jobs? It comes down to the complexity of the job. Here are three quick case studies to help clarify what each category does:

Basic Data Recovery

One of our customers accidentally installed Windows 10 over their existing operating system. This innocent mistake caused him to lose everything, including their Word files, Excel files and PDFs. But the worst was that they lost four year’s worth of cherished photos.

Drive Rescue recovered everything for him, including peace of mind.

Why was this categorized as Basic?

We knew this could be completed within a predictable amount of time. No cleanroom was required, nor were there any firmware or mechanical issues to slow down the process.

Standard Data Recovery

We had a customer whose 2TB Seagate Expansion external hard disk was no longer being recognised by their computer. The disk would spin, but none of the files could be accessed. A simple diagnosis revealed thousands of bad sectors and some corrupt firmware.

Using specialised equipment, Drive Rescue was able to work around the bad sectors and repair the corrupted firmware modules. All of the data was successfully recovered.

Why was this categorised as Standard?

While there were no mechanical issues and no cleanroom was required, this particular job came with a degree of difficulty due to the drive’s firmware issues.

Advanced Data Recovery

Another business customer of ours accidentally dropped her Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. The drop was short - from a coffee table to the floor - but it heavily damaged the drive. When she tried to use it with her computer, it began clicking, and none of her files were accessible. The slight fall caused severe disk-head damage, and these tiny components are what read the data.

Drive Rescue’s data experts carefully disassembled the drive in our Class-100 cleanroom and fitted it with replacement disk heads. This procedure also required the new assembly to be aligned, calibrated and torqued with nanometre precision - a difficult skill that takes years to master and perfect. The disk was encrypted with Bitlocker-to-Go so once the disk was operational again we had to decrypt it. Every piece of data was recovered, and our customer could breathe easily. We saved them hours of painstaking labour reconstructing Sage Accounts, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.

Why was this categorised as Advanced?

This was a highly complex job, requiring the use of a cleanroom to repair significant mechanical damage. An exact-match head disk assembly component also had to be used.