Should You Risk Recovering Data Yourself? or Should You Outsource It?

It happens often. Many customers don’t view their machines with the view that at any time, their data storage hardware could fail. They don’t schedule a backup, and when their hard drive does fail or has issues, you’re called up to recover the data. There are many good tools for recovering data from a failing hard drive, and we’ve covered those in the past. The question is, at what point do you decide either not to do the data recovery at all, or to give up trying to recover the data because you’re having issues accessing it?

High Value Data

If you’re looking at recovery of data from a business machine, you’ll want to consider a few factors. How valuable is this data, from a financial standpoint? Do you have insurance that will cover that? Even if you do have insurance, will that insurance cover data loss? Before you start on the job at all, make sure your policy covers exactly what you’re doing and that there aren’t any exemptions, because the small print can kill your business if you risk something that you’re not covered for. If it’s too much of a risk, you might consider passing it off to one of these data recovery vendors listed here.

If you’re looking at a residential machine, there will most likely be legal documents and precious photos, videos, and other personal data that has sentimental value to the owner. Find out how much they have backed up, if they have duplicates anywhere, or if they’ve still got all the pictures still stored on a USB drive or SD or MicroSD card, because many people just casually use their camera and never really delete all their photos from the storage card. Let them know what it would cost to have a data recovery specialist work on it, and discern if they really want their data that badly or if it’s that valuable to them. This is a good time to offer a backup solution to be set up on their new machine or any others they own, and point out how much less expensive a backup would be than using data recovery services for every storage hardware failure.

Data Recovery Failure

If you’ve decided to tackle the job yourself, hopefully you’ve decided to make a clone of the data before anything else. If you’re having trouble with your utilities, for example, if Ddrescue can’t see or access the drive, or you can’t even get a full clone of the hard drive, it’s probably time to inform the client and let them decide if they want to hand it over to a specialist. If you have access to DeepSpar Disk Imager, you may be able to perform recovery that isn’t possible with Ddrescue, but it’s a more expensive option.

Physical Hardware Failure

If the drive is actually making clicking and ‘chunking’ noises during operation, it’s a bad sign that there is a mechanical problem with it, and it would be best to consider the option of having a specialist look at it rather than trying to repair it or try to perform recovery on it in that state. If the drive doesn’t even spin up when you boot up the machine, that’s another indicator there’s a mechanical problem, and you would be better off handing it off to a specialist.

Profitability

Make sure your client understands the cost of the data recovery if you hand it off to a specialist. Right away most people think it’s going to cause thousands of dollars to recover their data, and they wave the idea off without a second thought, when they might actually consider $300 or less, depending on how much data is actually recovered and the policy of the specialist.

Depending on your rates, it could possibly be a more viable option to hand the hard drive off to a specialist who is insured and can afford that risk rather than both run the risk as well as perhaps end up losing the data and not being paid for your work, or worse, being sued for the loss.

Data recovery is a high risk field, and even more high risk when dealing with extremely valuable data, so if you’re not a specialist in the field, don’t get in over your head. Clients will appreciate it when you know your limits and don’t try to do something you’re not qualified for, and know when to hand it off to a specialist instead, rather than trying to make a quick buck with a high risk project, even though it means you didn’t get the job or get paid for it.

If you have any data recovery tips or stories, drop a comment below!