We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.
I’m just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.
One specific question I have pertains to what’s recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We’re only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there’s tons of OS and other files we don’t want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?
Definitely don’t. They might be able to run some tools that try to pull files from corrupt file systems but they definitely don’t have the specialty skills and knowledge on how to recover physically damaged hard disks.
What do you mean you need to send my car to a specialized shop to have the engine replaced? My mechanic has been fixing the oil leak for years for 50 bucks!!