This is going to be quite an extensive review and probably mostly useful to people with some IT…read moreknowledge. Because I can't just say that they're incompetent or that they're not. See below why.
I had a HDD that was not accessible in Windows any more. So I dropped it off at this location (they currently have two drop off locations) and waited.
First plus: They told me about the price and asked me to confirm within 24h. And they actually recovered what appears to be all the data (not easy to be sure with multiple 100 gigs) after just one work day.
But then there was already the first suspicious incident: They put logs of which files they recovered on their server and sent me the link to it. There was no HTTPS authentication or anything, the list of all my files was there for anyone to take. (They did remove it very quickly though after I asked them to)
When I got the drive from them, it was not readable. Windows asked me to format it before use and the file system showed up as RAW. Along comes the next suspicious incident... talking to one of their technicians about this issue. He asked what operating system I was using and whether I used the drive internally or externally. Fine. I used it internally and the issue was that Windows reported the file system as RAW and asked me to format the drive when trying to access it. The technician advised me to try it in an external enclosure. I did not see how that would change anything about either partition table, file system or anything really that could be at fault but alright - freak things do happen. He also said I might then still have issues because I use Windows 7 and that might have issues with external storage. So OK, I tried it out on Windows 7 and XP. Funnily enough, the disk management of Windows 7 reported at least the right size, that of XP did not (the drive was supposedly ~900GB big when it really was just ~470).
Now comes another plus - because of these issues and special circumstances they agreed to have a technician meet me at the drop off location and sell me an external drive with my data on it (I only had to pay for the drive, no service charges - and although I have not checked exactly what drive it is and what state it is in yet, $100 for 750GB sounds reasonable), showing me the actual data.
However... the meeting... I brought the disk they sent me in the enclosure because they asked me to, so they can check it out for themselves too. I did not screw anything tight because it was just going to be in there for a matter of hours anyway. The technician picks it up, due to the lack of screws, it moves a bit inside and he says that it's no wonder that it's not working - there are parts moving inside and that it has been stored wrong.
Now... I'm not up to date with internal 3,5" drive technology but at least about 10 years ago, I learned that such drives are very vulnerable to physical shock. So I was slightly horrified when he actually SHOOK it!
After my explanation, he proceeded from the shaking to plugging it in and... here is another thing I at least learned back when - that such drives are highly vulnerable while they are running and one should under no circumstances touch them while they are powered on. And that they are especially sensitive while they spin up. Well... while it was spinning up, he picked it up and held it to his ear!
Between these things, he explained something about a possible mechanical issue that may have corrupted the drive and something about bad sectors, which all sounded very fishy because of the experience I had in the past with mechanical issues and bad sectors and also what I had read about it. It seemed to me like he just wanted to feed me ANY explanation really. (And having by now done a 4 hour surface test on the drive, it seems everything is fine with it...)
When he saw the error that I saw on two different machines myself, I told him about the size difference in disk management on Windows 7/XP, hoping he would check it out himself and restore my confidence by being able to explain why that is. Watching him navigate through the menus, I couldn't help but wonder "What is he doing in the device manager?". He seemed very confident in his skills (and not that appreciative of what I had to say - typically overconfident "IT professional", I suppose...), so I didn't want to start explaining to him that it's nonsensical for him to try to see anything there.
So I just let him move on and in the end, my data was on that drive he brought and by now it is also on a RAID 1 volume...
Hence... I am very unsure about this company. They DID recover my data, they WERE accommodating but because of the many oddities described above, I am not sure how much of their recovery process was competence and how much luck. That is why I described all of this in so much detail, hoping it will be enough for anybody looking for a data recovery service that is decent, yet affordable, to make up his own mind.
