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Finding a data recovery service with excellent customer service

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

The Data Rescue Center offers excellent customer service

I’m going to make a profound statement: Data recovery is not the same as, say, lawn mower servicing. Hard drive recovery is obviously more involved and is an extremely technical task. A hard drive recovery engineer cannot just get a repair manual and attempt recovery. Recovery engineers go through extensive training so that they perform safe, effective retrievals.

Horror stories of botched or improper drive recovery abound. A news story earlier this year recounted one such incident. A woman took her high-end computer back to the electronics retail store because she was having issues. She fully expected the computer to remain in-house for repair. It didn’t.

When she hadn’t heard back about her computer for some time, she called the store to check the progress. She was then told that it had been shipped out to a regional repair facility, obviously without her consent, and that they would check on it. To make an extremely long story short, she finally got a replacement computer after several months of waiting. However, all of her personal computer data was lost forever. Her digital pictures, music collection, videos, work and home documents, everything.

Customer service is extremely important when dealing with a client’s critical data. Unfortunately, this woman’s story is not untypical. Critical files have been lost, damaged and stolen because care was not used. Poor customer service causes distrust and unnecessary anxiety.

We understand that the client is an important part of the process, whether it be business server repair or flash drive recovery from a personal digital camera. Always make sure your equipment is being handled properly and securely. You should be consulted at every step of the process as well.

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Scams and dirty tricks in the computer recovery industry

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Data recovery scams and tricks to be aware of...

One of the worst things seen in the computer recovery industry is the outright scams and dirty tricks that are prevalent.

Lock Your Drive: You send your drive off to a company and they quote you $2000.. Yikes, that’s a lot, so you send it to a few other companies, but the other companies say they can’t get any data from the drive no matter what the cost. Ok, the original company, although expensive, must be good, since they’re the only ones that are able to get any data for you. It’s expensive but seemingly the only option. What may have happened, and it happens every day, is that original shop may have locked your drive with a password. Only they know what that password is now, so anyone else looking at it might not have access to the data… So they’ve in essence locked you into their service and their price—You have no other option.. Dirty….

Clone Then Ruin Your Drive: A similar dirty trick is where a company may get your drive and then quote you say, $3000. Of course you say no to that and want them to send it back to you. In the meantime, they’ve already cloned the drive, so they have a good copy of the data on something back in their lab. They will then physically damage your drive in what looks like a naturally occurring way, which makes the data unrecoverable. So you get your drive back and send it to other shops… The other shops will look at the damage (which looks all legit) and tell you that they can’t get anything from a drive in that condition. Once again, the first company looks like a hero, being able to recover data from a drive that no one else can… So you send the drive back to them, which they receive, and they get the data from that clone they have. You walk away thinking, “Wow, that company was expensive, but they sure are great, they got it back when everyone else said it was impossible!”

Punishment for shopping price: Another dirty trick is where you send your drive to a company and they quote you. The pricing is high, so you want to shop it around. They return the drive to you and you send it out to a few other shops, getting quotes. I turns out that the first place was the best price, so you go back to them. However, they now tell you that “your drive has been opened in an unclean environment, which has contaminated the platter and now it’s going to cost another $1000 on top of that original quote”. Wow, now you’re mad at the other companies, since one of them must’ve opened your drive in a dirty environment and now it’s gonna cost you even more to get your data back! In reality, the original company might be scamming you. They will in essence punish you for shopping the drive around, and in the meantime, they will use this as a way to ruin the reputation of the other service companies you sent your drive to. We have seen this happen before and did an experiment to prove what was going on. We knew about this scam being used by a very large recovery house here in the U.S. We had someone pose as a customer send a drive to that service shop. They quoted the recovery and the fake customer asked to have his drive returned, since he couldn’t afford the amount. When the drive was received back from that original service shop, the fake customer just let the drive sit in his office.. About a month later, we had him put some stickers from our company onto the outside case of his hard drive (non-tamper stickers usually affixed to a drive after servicing or inspection). Note, the customer never opened up his hard drive, and he never sent it to us to open up. He simply took a few stickers and stuck them to the outside of the drive. He then sent the drive back to the original company. They received it and saw those stickers and assumed “oh, he sent it to someone else to get a quote.”- That original company then contacted the fake customer and told him, “your drive has been opened in an unclean environment, which has contaminated the platter and now it’s going to cost another $1000 on top of that original quote.” —- That’s right, they assumed his drive was sent off to a competing company (heck, the evidence was there because those stickers were there, right?). They tried to make the second company look bad, but in reality it exposed that they were indeed performing this scam.
In Conclusion:
 As a computer user, you are likely never really worrying about your important computer files like digital photos and videos, financial documents and digital music files. Yes, there are backup solutions readily available for a low cost, but most of us seem too busy to take time to ensure we’re protected. For that reason, many computer users find themselves panicking once a computer crash occurs. It is during this crisis that you must take time out to investigate your possible solutions and then find a truly trustworthy company to work with. Simply searching the web for positive reviews or “customer” recommendations is no longer a reliable way as this is being abused by fake review sites and paid-for customer review postings. A great way to find out more about a company is to use the old-fashioned telephone communication model. Call up the company and talk to them, hear what they have to say and ask many questions. Ask them to call you back and see if they do. Do they respond to you in a manner that satisfies your needs as a potential customer? If not, then they are likely to fail you even if you become a paying customer.

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What to be wary of for hard drive recovery services:

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Watch out for companies offering a "Low-Cost Guarantee"

Low-Cost / Maximum Cost Guarantees:  Any company that promises you a “Guaranteed” cost of $399 or $499 without ever seeing your drive. That will not get you physical recovery. When they claim that, they are hoping you send the hard drive in without trying a software solution yourself. If they get the job and the software solution works, they can charge you that amount. If the recovery does indeed require physical recovery work, they can try to re-quote you or send it back and say they weren’t able to recover it. You may want to check to see what their return shipping costs are, to make sure they aren’t trying to make money off of that as well. They might also contact you and say that “they” can’t get the data back for you (at that guaranteed low cost), but they can pass the drive onto a partner who can (no guaranteed cost). It’s the old bait-and-switch technique to be careful of.

Cleanroom or Kindacleanroom: Make sure the company has a cleanroom—Sure, they may say they do on their website, but we all know the web really isn’t policed. If they have a cleanroom, they would be proud of it and show it off with a picture or two on their website. If someone opens your hard drive in a non-cleanroom environment, your drive will likely suffer damage that will either make the data unrecoverable (due to scoring caused by particles) or will make it more difficult and more expensive for the eventual recovery. Do not trust that they have a cleanroom just because they say they do, require some proof.
Virtual Recovery Shops: Make sure the company actually exists and does the work themselves. Many people are setting up websites with great stock photos, industry keywords and a phone number or email address. They get you to send the drive to them but in reality they don’t do any of the work themselves. What they will do is send your drive to a few shops, seeking out the best price. Then they contact you back and give you an inflated price. If the shop can do it for $1000, they might contact you and say it’s $3000… You might say you can’t afford that, but you then negotiate down to $2000, thinking you’re getting a great deal. In reality, you just paid double what it would’ve cost you if you contacted the legit place by yourself.

Trustworthy/Background Checks: The last thing you want to do is send your computer hard drive to someone you can’t trust. Personal photos, banking information and other personal data should be entrusted only to a professional company. You don’t want your personal pictures posted online or your financial information rifled through. Make sure all their employees undergo a background check and make sure the company itself has a good standing with a service like the Better Business Bureau or similar consumer protection agency.

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Physical Hard Drive Failure

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

Class 100 Cleanroom

Physical hard drive failure occurs when one of the mechanisms inside of your hard drive breaks or fails. Realizing that your hard drive is spinning around inside at speeds of up to 10,000 rotations per minute (even faster in some top-speed drives), you can imagine that something might go wrong at some point in time, especially when they are trying to cut costs for producing these hard drives.  Once you’ve determined that your hard drive is suffering from a physical issue, you need to take time to find a computer recovery service that you can trust with your data. Employee background checks, secure storage of your hard drive, a certified cleanroom and technical expertise are all needed to protect you from harm and provide the best chance at recovering the data

A physical hard drive recovery service is expensive. Think of them as brain surgeons for your computer. Yes, if you scratch your arm, you mom can easily clean you up and throw on a band-aid, but if you need brain surgery, you can’t trust your mom to do the job. The same is true for physical hard drive recovery. You can’t go to an all-around computer store to get this done. Likewise, you can’t trust your IT uncle or Geek friend to do it either. Physical computer recovery requires specific tools, costing $15,000 and up, as well as a cleanroom and years of daily recovery experience. Your IT uncle or geek friend just doesn’t have the tools, facilities or technical experience to perform this type of work. In fact, if you let them try, they will almost surely cause more damage to the drive, making the professional’s job even harder (as in more expensive for you). You wouldn’t trust your mom to perform brain surgery on you so don’t trust non-professionals to check out your hard drive.

www.TheDataRescueCenter.com does background checks on all employees, makes use of a Class 2 Vault for customer hard drive storage and employs only the finest data recovery engineers and advisors. The new facility in Livermore, California also employs Pentafluoroethane Gas Fire Suppression (ECARO-25 FIke) System as well as above and below grid motion sensors and RGB cameras to provide best in class protection of customer hard drives.

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Security Issues with Cloud Computing

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Cloud computing and security?

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days. According to some folks, everyone needs to move their personal and business computing to the cloud. Apps hosted online run the gamut from email to office productivity. Computers are being developed that work almost entirely online. For example, the Google Chromebooks connect to the Internet the moment they boot up. Email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations are generated and stored immediately online. If you lose or damage your Chromebook, you simply get another one and keep on computing.

It sounds great, right? But I want you to look at it from another perspective before you get too excited. Here at The Data Rescue Center, we perform emergency data recovery for people and businesses that have failed hard drives or missing data from accidental deletion and other data disasters. They bring in their hard drive. We assess the damage, provide a quote and recover the data. Did you see the first item? They bring in their hard drive.

If you lose your data online, you can’t bring in the hard drive. If the online service has hard drive failures, you can’t bring in the hard drive. If hackers break into the online servers and erase your data, you can’t bring in the hard drive. If your files are lost, damaged or stolen from a cloud server, we can’t help you. Nor can any other data recovery company. A data recovery service requires a physical hard drive.

Please understand that I’m not saying that all online services are unreliable. Many are conscientious and will take good care of your files. However, if something does happen to your data, you must deal with them, on their schedule, along with the hundreds or thousands of other users of the service as well. If your files are mission critical, if they are necessary to keep your business in operation, then you should consider the possible consequences and make sure you have both a local copy of your files as well as a backup somewhere.

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BYOD to Work

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Bring Your Own Device to Work?

BYOD is an acronym that stands for Bring Your Own Device. Many workplaces allow employees to bring their own data devices to work and connect to the company’s network. Allegedly, this increases productivity and keeps equipment costs down as well. Unfortunately, unless certain precautions and security measures are employed, BYOD could just as well stand for Bring Your Own Destruction.

Here at The Data Rescue Center, a data recovery lab in Livermore, California, we see damage that is caused by lax BYOD policies. There are several dangers in allowing employees to use their personal devices for work. For example, not every computer user employs adequate antivirus and malware protection. I’ve often worked with folks who didn’t realize that the AV software that came on their new laptop was only a trial version that had to be renewed after three to six months.

Back in the day, computer viruses were often transmitted from machine to machine via a floppy disk. While the floppies are gone, the risk is still prevalent. The old floppy has been replaced by the USB key or flash drive. Their capacity makes it very easy for a complex virus or keylogger program to hide in email attachments saved to the drive.

Smartphones, tablet PCs and media devices are not immune from infection. Allowing a device to connect to a business network without proper security measures is asking for trouble. If a computer or server is infected, HDD data recovery might be necessary to retrieve lost or inaccessible files. This could disrupt business operations, even to the point of financial loss. Add to that the data recovery prices that will need to be paid. You may find that allowing these devices on your system may not worth the perceived benefits.

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Top Trends in Security Threats

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Data Breach

A recent post on the Experian Data Breach Resolution blog identified five of the top trends in security breach threats. They listed five classes of threats that appear to be the most troublesome:

· Targeted attacks are attacks that usually focus on gaining access to sensitive information from a particular company. These are often perpetrated by sending email links and attachments that appear to be from legitimate sources.
· Information compromise of social networks and social engineering sites is accomplished by posing as friends, thereby gaining access to personal information.
· Zero-day rootkits and vulnerabilities are often called hide-and-seek attacks. Hackers insert their malware into a company’s system, attempting to hide them from detection until a security vulnerability is discovered.
· The sophistication of mobile device operating systems make mobile threats a growing concern. Trojans and other malware are often secreted in seemingly legitimate phone apps, waiting to glean sensitive information.
· Probably the most insidious threat, in my opinion, is the availability of kits that allow the creation of malware without any expertise. In 2011 alone, the creation of over 268 million variants was made possible through DIY malware kits. This statistic comes from Symantec, a leader in security technology.

I believe that these malware kits present a particular danger to computer users’ data. An expert hacker will normally try to not leave any trace of infiltration, leaving the door open to future attacks. However, a would-be attacker, with little or no expertise, might create an attack weapon that trashes the drive on the victim’s computer, damaging valuable data files.

Our recovery engineers at The Data Rescue Center are expertly trained in HDD data recovery. If your data has become inaccessible, our data recovery lab is fully equipped to handle any type of damage that has occurred. Call us today to see what options are available and to check our data recovery prices. Becoming informed before disaster strikes will keep panic to a minimum and ensure expedient recovery.

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Make Sure You Can Trust Who Has Your Data

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Megaupload and Megavideo shut down by the Feds

Cloud computing services, such as online file sharing, file storage and backup, have become very popular over the last few years. These online services give the home computer user the ability to quickly and easily share personal photos and home videos. The business computer user also benefits from the ability to access their files from any computer in the world, enhancing business mobility.

Even so, recent events should warn us all that we need to be careful with whom we trust our data. The FBI seized and shutdown the servers used by Megaupload and Megavideo, two related online file storage and sharing sites. They were allegedly allowing users to upload illegal, copyrighted files. As a result, many innocent site users lost access to their important files. Furthermore, it appeared as if their files were going to be deleted before they could be retrieved. Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit legal service, is working to ensure these files can be reclaimed.

Caution should also be exercised when choosing a data recovery company. Emergency data recovery is a complex, exacting process and you need to trust the company that you are contracting for recovery. The Data Rescue Center is a data recovery service in Livermore, California, and we would invite you to check our credentials. We are a BBB accredited business and we take the protection of your data seriously.

We do all recovery in-house, have 24-hour surveillance cameras and protect your equipment in a UL listed Class 2 vault when it is not being repaired. Additionally, the computers used to recover your data are never Internet connected, ensuring that your files are safe from hacker attacks and viruses.

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Do You Know Where Your Hard Drive is Tonight?

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Bamboozled: Unknown error on PC repair

A recent news article about a New Jersey woman’s quest for simple data recovery drives home a simple point. It is imperative that the client’s equipment be handled safely and securely when dealing with data recovery.

The lady had taken her high-end computer to a local electronics retailer so that their computer technicians could try to recover some files that had come up missing. After hearing nothing about her computer for several weeks, the lady finally got a call telling her that the motherboard and fan had fried. Amazingly, the call came from a repair center several states away. She had never been informed that her computer had been shipped out of state for repair. After being shipped back and forth between New Jersey and Kentucky several more times, the computer was deemed irreparably damaged and a replacement computer was eventually given to the customer in January. Of course, this replacement computer had none of her files on there, since it was a brand-new computer. Her entire photo collection, personal documents and more were all gone-

Unfortunately, when clients take their hard drives to a data recovery lab, they could suffer the same fate. Many of these so-called labs are merely collection points and the recovery work is actually done at a remote location. The drive stands the chance of being damaged, lost or stolen any time it is shipped to another facility.

When a drive is placed in The Data Rescue Center’s care, all of the work is done in-house. The drive is secured in a UL listed class 2 security vault when it is not being repaired. The client is informed and consulted with at every step of the recovery process. This includes everything from initial quotes on data recovery prices to the results of the HDD data recovery process.

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How to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Protect yourself from identity theft.

The recent successful cyber-attack on online retailer, Zappos, should sound a warning to everyone who uses the Internet for activities that involve sensitive information. Hackers stole important information from approximately 24,000,000 users of the Zappos site. Information that was stolen included names, addresses, telephone numbers and the last four digits of customers’ credit card numbers.

Secure password practice is extremely important when an Internet user is developing their online persona. Unfortunately, many folks use inadequate and even unsafe techniques when they developed their passwords. Here are some do’s and don’ts for password creation and usage.

· Don’t use passwords that are easy to crack. Use a combination of upper and lowercase letters and numbers. Do not use common words or the names of your children or pets.
· Do use a different password for every website log on. This is especially true if you use social networking sites. Use the secure mode on networking sites if it is available.
· Use a password generator to make your passwords. This type of software will generate random passwords and allow you to store them in one place on your computer. The password database is encrypted and requires a password to open, the only one that you will have to remember.
· Only enter password and personal identification information on websites that display the secure website symbol.

The Data Rescue Center recommends that you also use caution when you need emergency data recovery. You need to choose a data recovery company that is trustworthy. Our data recovery service is located in Livermore, California. We hold a Better Business Bureau A+ rating. All of our employees, including our recovery engineers, are given extensive background checks before they are hired as well. We are the only data recovery service in the world with a Class 2 Vault to store your hard drive.

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