The best professional hard drive data recovery services in comparison
If hard drives, SSD or other data carriers strike, only the order with the data rescue professional helps. We compare the providers, show how data recovery works in practice and what you need to look out for
If the hard drive with important data or the media collection only makes clicking noises, the desperation is great. Much worse is the fear that the data stored on it could disappear forever in nirvana. For the home user, photos, videos and music are practically the whole life on the hard drive today. A crash can make the memories of recent years disappear. In companies or the self-employed already a lost database can cause existence-threatening damage. The best and easiest protection - the backup - does not require many users, despite Time Machine, low-cost mass storage and cloud services.
Hard Disk Defects - Most Common Causes
Housing fires, water damage or overvoltage occur, but are, according to data recovery experts, the rare extreme cases that trigger data loss. As a rule, customers come for banal user errors or misadventures of everyday life. "The classic is the fallen hard disk, desktop and mobile memory are getting smaller, but inside is still very sensitive mechanics, notebooks do not even fall down, partly we have cases where too hard slamming has been enough," said Andreas Mortensen of Attingo in Hamburg.
Damaged hard drives often emit clacking noises - possible sign of a damaged read / write head. The often gone, but unfortunately wrong way, is the repeated turning on and off of the hard disk. The experts recommend that the device be better skipped. "A small spot on the magnetic disk can often quickly lead to total damage, with the read / write head typically floating in the nanometer range over the disk, and even broken drives continue to move over the spinning disks." "Quick scratching can damage the heads on the magnetic layer Ring arise and cause the fatal head crash "warns Mortensen. The better way is to call the specialists. The first consultation, in which you describe the problem and can be advised on further steps, is free and without obligation.
Data recovery from professionals: All data carriers, good chances of success
If the rescue software fails in the event of accidentally deleted data, or if a data carrier has a physical problem and the medium is no longer recognized by the Mac, the only thing left to do is save the data. The specialists not only have the knowledge to retrieve the data, but also the equipment such as software and the necessary laboratory environment to open the hard disks and spare parts. For example, Attingo has more than 10,000 spare parts, such as read / write heads, from all current manufacturers and models - around 99 percent of the components are covered so that parts can be changed quickly in the event of an emergency. In addition, data recovery permanently means to further develop its know-how. "There are always new components, new systems and therefore always a new situation - you have to be prepared to be able to make the data available to customers in a timely manner", says Mortensen.
Professional data rescuers today are prepared for all types of digital media: hard drives, raids, flash memory such as USB sticks, memory cards or SSDs. Exotics such as tape drives, optical data carriers such as DVD and Bluray and floppy disks are also part of the repertoire. Since today more and more critical data land on the smartphone, but the mobile companions are often exposed to shocks and extreme temperatures, some such as Kuert Datenrettung explicitly offer on their website the data recovery from the iPhone. Professionals work independently of the operating system and can restore the data from all platforms.
The chances are not bad to recover the data completely or for the most part. On average, the professionals call success rates of around 85 to 90 percent, with some data carriers, such as Raid systems, the odds are even better. The chances of success depend not only on the type and degree of corruption of the data carrier, but also on the type of data. Here, the simpler the data, the easier. Ralph Hensel, Senior Data Recovery Manager at Convar in Pirmasens, explains: "For example, restoring 99.8% of a database may not be useful because the restored, linked data will still not work, unlike images , Documents, et cetera. Here a loss of usually a few percent is not a problem since every single image can be used per se. "
