Best data recovery places in the u.s.?

You can’t get best and cheap. You can’t have both.

To have the facilities to have a nice clean room and the best technicians on the planet takes money. If you want a breadbox data recovery service that will (sometimes) corrupt your data worse just by checking it, you might go with cheap. There’s a bunch of different programs you could run on the data where you pay someone something and get nothing recovered.

If you want the best in the business call Ontrack. They probably won’t be cheap but you can call and find out the exact prices for what you want to do.

I know for a fact that if they can’t recover it, it can’t be recovered.

You’re sure that the disk has failed and that the operating system isn’t just messed up right? As in, you’ve tried it in another computer as a slave or put it in an external casing to see if you can read the data on it?

There’s also Drive Savers up in the Bay Area. But again, not cheap.

a technician at the local Mac place (not an Apple Store) confirmed, that yes, it had mechanical failure, which based on the fact that I tried to use DiskWarrior to confirm the extent of damage, and it couldn’t read the had drive, had already suspected. I don’t have a lot of money, sadly. it doesn’t matter if I recover the whole disk, just the most recent recent of a novel written on a program called Scrivener. (which stores multiple drafts of projects, much like Time Machine, in a way.)

I live in the Boston area. I don’t mind mailing the drive to other places.

It should be noted that data-recovery is never cheap. If your data is not literally valuable in terms of thousands of dollars, it may not be worth recovering.

But you could always keep the drive around the house until someday when you strike it rich. That’s what I do with my old failed drive full of family photos and my terrible high school poetry.

Why does it cost so much money?

@shadling21, it costs so much, in part because recovering data matters so much to the person who would like to get it recovered.

@lapilofu, of course I meant cheap in comparative terms.

not an option for me. I have the hard drives out of the computers.

besides which, as I said above, I had already tried doing that with another app called DiskWarrior.