Review of Data Recovery Services for Apple Macintosh Hard Drives
My wife and I had the unfortunate experience of having her Mac mini’s hard drive crash. She had everything on her hard drive — family photos, all of her graphic design work, fonts, important emails, etc… — but no backup! I’ve experienced two catastrophic data failures before, and that taught me to backup my MacBook Pro every 1-2 weeks. I assumed that my wife was backing up her important files to DVD or to one of our external USB 2.0 drives. However, that wasn’t the case.
Since she didn’t have any backups of her data, she was looking at a complete loss. I quickly got online and started researching data recovery services. The hard part of my search was finding a data recovery service that supported recovery for Macs.
Ninety percent of the companies I found didn’t look trustworthy or legitimate. I narrowed it down to about three companies, and decided to go with a company that had a low flat fee. They looked legitimate, and they said they could restore my data from a Mac hard drive, and then copy it to a new one.
You Get What You Pay For
Going with the cheaper company ended up being a disaster and a waste of time and money. They went well past their turn around time before contacting me — which amounted to almost two weeks of waiting. I eventually was able to talk to their tech who told me that they were able to recover a ton of information. He went over many files and folders that he said he had recovered and it sounded like everything had been restored. However, as I learned later, that wasn’t the case at all.
I should have known that something was awry when I was told that they couldn’t format my drive with a Macintosh format. Instead, I had to choose between FAT32 or NTFS. They also said that they couldn’t restore the full directory structure of my old hard drive. At the time, I just assumed that was normal.
Days later I got my hard drive back. To my unpleasant surprise, 80 percent of the files were corrupt and the actual content of the files was empty. They were just placeholder files that had the correct file name, but nothing else — basically aliases without a target. In fact, the only thing that was correctly recovered were her photos. That entire experience cost us about $700.
DriveSavers to the Rescue
We were desperate to recover her information, so we decided to go with a company that had been recommended to us at the beginning of our search. We were told by a trusted Apple Certified technician to use DriveSavers, but we were reluctant to use them because they’re very expensive. My wife and I decided to bite the bullet and let them take a stab at her hard drive.
Working with DriveSavers was a completely different experience from the other company. During my initial discussion with their salesperson, she asked me who I had used before. For a brief second I couldn’t remember, and then she said the name of the first company and I was astonished. I asked her how she knew, and she said that they get a lot of customers from people who have used them first, and that they actually refer their clients to them if they can’t successfully recover the data. I felt like a dope, but at least I wasn’t alone in my experience.
DriveSavers got to my hard drive within their specified turn around time, and they were able to recover 100 percent of my hard drive’s data. Not only that, they were able to format my hard drive for my Macintosh, and were able to retain the exact directory structure as my old hard drive. Simply put, they were absolutely amazing!
The service was expensive, but in this case, you get what you pay for. I ended up paying about $2,000 to restore my almost full 80GB 2.5 hard drive, but everything I got from them was absolutely perfect.
If you ever have a hard drive, whether it be a Macintosh or Windows formatted hard drive, I highly recommend using DriveSavers for your data recovery. I told them that I was going to write about my experience online, so they gave me a special code that will give anyone 10 percent off their services. All you have to do is call them at (800) 440-1904 give the salesperson this code DS16990 and they’ll give you a 10 percent discount off your order.
Filed under: Commentary
Congratulations you eventually got your data back, I can relate to that experience. The last backup from my powerbook had been a tad aged when its disk decided to go grinding and produced read errors on a bout 30% of its blocks. Everything was still under warranty, but what about my data?
I skip the issues with FW-target mode, flaky disks, and no network interface while booted from CD here and just summarize that a dd of the entire drive to another block-by-block took 15 days, mostly due to the eternal retries to read defective blocks (they were replaced by blank blocks on the target device if they continued to fail [conv=sync for the dd initiate]). 15 days of just leaving the powerbook on AC in the corner and watch the read errors scroll by. The resulting disk had the same three partitions as the original one, with readable if somewhat corrupted information due to the skipped defective blocks. No more time-outs on read attempts! It then was a breeze to fix the disc structure using the appropriate tools (Disk Repair for the HFS+ volumes, fsck for the (largest) ufs Volume). When that was done and the content proved as fine as possible (after all, some files happened to have had their data on an unrevocerable block), I umounted and disconnected the external firewire volume, and reformatted the defective one to hand in for the warranty replacement.
This could be a happy ending, if it weren’t for the big flaws in Apples firewire which persisted at least back then. On reconnecting the drive to the repaired Powerbook, I had forgotten to turn off automatic detection and mounting of the HFS+ partitions (which I had only mounted read-only before), they got automatically mounted read-write, and automatically corrupted.
I guess it’s my own fault I didn’t take a physical non-Apple-dependant block-by-block image in the meantime.
This was a bitter experience indeed i mean nobody what so ever would like to loose their data under any circumstances and further more when the data was of such a high importance. Well i know that the data recovery compabies are life savers in most of the cases but it always helps to take a backup of the data that would be useful to restore it at any given time. This would always help. I sent some of my friends to Disk Doctors Labs Inc and most of the times they did not let me down.
Providing technical support since 1997 at an institution of higher education, I have plenty of experience with “crashed” drives in Windows 95 and Windows 2000 Professional. Now that increasing numbers of graduate students are buying Macintosh (especially MacBooks) I am reading all this with an eye to advising folks about preventive care (backup).
One thing that might work for dying hard drives (not sure about crashed hard drives).
My PowerBook 12″ Rev A’s original hard drive started dying. Silly me didn’t recognize the telltale signs–kernel panics and even clicking sounds! So I didn’t make a backup. Bad idea.
Anyway, one day, it finally dies. I get a kernel panic every time I try to boot, and once getting the sad mac icon.
I took it in, replaced the hard drive, and put the old hard drive in a firewire enclosure hoping to get some data off it.
Disk utility wouldn’t recognize it or mount it! Out of luck…
Then, I tried connecting it to a PC using USB 2.0. Somehow, it was recognized… but can’t read HFS? I bought MacDisk (and tried MacDrive, it works too) to recover my files. Thank goodness… Strange enough, now, the Mac can even mount the drive.
Not sure what circumstances allowed this, but it saved me $1000s.
I have had the same experience. My hard drive had a bad sector on it. I had to reinstall Windows XP onto my computer and I lost EVERYTHING! Now I know I need to get an external hard drive. I have been looking at some but no deal yet.
As a precaution, you should not overwrite the affected hard drive viz. by installing any software on it or by pasting any files. Also, when you are salvaging your data, you should not save the files on the affected hard drive because it may be again resulted in form of data overwritten.
DriveSavers got to my hard drive within their specified turn around time, and they were able to recover 100 percent of my hard drive’s data.