Data Recovery Service

Fixed Fee: ₪350

There's nothing worse than losing all your precious data after a hard disk failure! We've had clients literally in tears at the thought of losing all their photos, music, documents, spreadsheets, business- or home accounts, and even e-mails.

The first rule is always to have a reliable, proven backup strategy: if you don't yet have one, see our Backup Strategies service now.

Secondly, at the slightest suspicion that your computer's hard disk might be failing, turn it off at once! Some failures are progressive, and the more the disk is used, the more likely it is for the failure to be terminal and without further warning.

If the disk is not yet absolutely dead, we may be able to help. We'll treat the disk with kid gloves, and attempt several different methods to recover your data on to one of our server disks. This can take a very long time to accomplish, sometimes several days, but it has often worked. In some cases the disk has failed repeatedly during the recovery process, but after re-starting we've been able to recover all the client's data, albeit after several attempts.

If we have been successful, we'll then copy the recovered data on to a flash drive or external portable hard disk, depending upon the volume of data recovered. If you don't already have such a device, we can obtain one for you and charge you for the cost of the device.

Of course as with our first rule above, you'll owe us nothing if we fail, no matter how long we've spent trying. Also if the recovery has appeared to be successful, we will then attempt to open a random selection of user data files of different types to ensure that they are actually intact and hence usable. In our experience sometimes most of the "recovered" files turn out to be so badly corrupted that they cannot be used.

Notes:

• If the hard drive makes a distinct and regular clicking noise (the so-called "click-of-death"), it is almost certainly beyond economic recovery. Obviously, we don't have the expensive forensic disc recovery equipment which would be required for such circumstances.

• Business desktop computers: if the problem stems from a corrupt hard disk RAID configuration, especially if this involves RAID-0 (striped disks), we charge a minimum fixed fee of ₪250 for attempting a recovery, whatever the outcome, and the full ₪350 would apply only if we're successful.