What Drives Data Recovery Pricing?

Many clients experience Sticker Shock when they hear the prices for Data Recovery. What drives data recovery pricing and why is it sometimes so expensive? There are many factors that are taken into consideration when determining price.

Research & Development: Hard Drive manufacturers do not release any technical information about their products. As a matter of fact, they keep their technical information very guarded. Virtually everything a Data Recovery company knows about how a hard drive works is the result of research and reverse engineering of these devices. This is a very costly process but it is also critical to the success of recovering data.

Parts: Often recovering data from failed hard drives requires the purchasing of several identical drives. Industry specific resources are required to locate compatible drives. Technical knowledge is required to know what drives are compatible and cash layout is required to purchase the drives with the sole intent of disassembling them to use their parts. No warranty returns for these drives.

Equipment & Software: There are many pieces of specialized equipment needed for successful data recovery from failed hard drives. The work inside a hard drive has to be performed in a clean room environment along with the specialized tools required to do the work. There is also special equipment needed to access drives that have problems. Once access to a hard drive is obtained, customized software is needed to read and image these faulty and unstable devices. After an image is obtained, other software and expert file system knowledge is required to make the data accessible under a specific Operating System.

Time: The Data Recovery process can be very time consuming in both man hours and platform time. There are times a device can take over a week to obtain a complete image before we can even start to work on the logical phase of the recovery.