Data Disasters: how do you recover your business data? How much does it cost? Why the range?
Data Disasters
I can’t stress enough how important it is to get a professional to recover your data. At least once a month I get a call from someone who tried some video from YouTube to recover their data and failed. Most amateur attempts to recover data worsen your chances of recovering data.
A tale of two drives
Recently I had two different clients with data disasters. Their older laptops just stopped working with no warning. Both clients needed business data recovered.
This is one of more common data disasters I see. The storage container for the data failed. In their case it was the laptop motherboard. Other examples are external hard drive case failure. Usually it’s easy and cheaper to recover data in this scenario.
The more expensive scenario is where the storage medium has been damaged such as a laptop drop, building flood/fire, drink spilled on computer or power surge. I’m not going to deal with ransomware damage in this blog, just physical damage.
The type and size of the hard drive you’re trying to recover is key in a) recovery of data and b) cost of the recovery.
Hard drive types SSD vs HDD
Solid State Drives (SSD) are found in almost all laptops now and all smartphones. This a newer technology and it makes for quick boot times. There are no mechanical parts in these drives, everything is stored on chips. SSDs are smaller and lighter than HDDs which is another reason why manufacturers love them for laptops.
The traditional HDD (hard disk drive) requires moving parts to store the data. It’s like a record player with a needle that records and rerecords data. And like a record it can get skips in the data.
Because of the difference in the storage types, typically it is easier to recover data from an HDD than a SSD. 
Size Matters
When you pay for professional data recovery you’re not just paying for their ability to read the data. You’re paying for the time it takes them to recover the data. It takes longer to recover 1 terabyte (TB) than 50 gigabytes (GB).
More about how professional data recovery pricing works here.
I have seen data recovery costs range from $400 to over $1000. That does not include the business costs associated with data loss such as lost time and revenue.
Data accidents happen.
