Good data recovery tool for a good price

George Stobbart

George Stobbart

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Hello Everyone. I am new on this forum.

I just opened up a tech shop in Dominica and I am planning to take on some cases for HDD data recovery. At my previous job we used PC3000 and DeepSpar DDI3 and DDI4. However these are incredibly expensive for my operation. Each one is over 3500 USD :-0.

Software, no matter how well it’s built can’t do recovery right because of PC limitations itself. Does anyone know if there is a hardware solution (Data Recovery Imager of some sort) that doesn’t require to sell a kidney and one of my kids? Any experience that you had in the past?

I would really appreciate your help
 
Pretty much your only choice is to set up a linux box with ddrescue. Otherwise it's spending lots of moula on a data recovery machine.

Various ways to set up ddrescue... I just used an ubuntu install and added the needed ddrescue packages. It has worked well for me, I have saved data from all but a couple drives that were head crashed.
 
Thanks guys. Dolphin is as expensive and our data recovery guys sweared at them all the time.
I am familiar with ddrescue. It's a great little tool, but once you hit bad sectors, it's kinda useless. I can't believe there is no data recovery equipment for regular IT shops. It feels like there's just software and then clean room.

Thank you for your feedback though,
 
I have lots of DFL data recovery gear (DDP, URE, FRP-WD+ST) and I think they are the only provider of DR equipment that falls between ddrescue and PC3k, aside from MRT which is very buggy, I understand. DFL products are far from perfect but they try hard to fix reported bugs and improve their products and their support is excellent. The DFL-DDP is a good H/W imager that also incorporates many common firmware repair features. It's $3,300 USD so not cheap, but still cheaper than a DDI. You can probably pick up a used SRP (a DFL tool that incorporates DDP and whichever DFL-FRP firmware tools you have licenses for) at a good price on the hddguru.com forum. If you expect to be a DR-only shop in a market that can support the high cost of equipment and support agreements, then I'd suggest a DDI4 until you can afford/justify a PC3K. DFL products are intended for DR noobs like me who also depend on other sources of income like computer repairs.
 
Thanks Larry.

If I had 3K I would already got a DDI or used PC3000. I am trying to figure out if there is an alternative. Something in between. I will check HDDguru also. I appreciate your input.
 
Perhaps you should just outsource the projects to a lab who has the tools until you have enough volume and money to afford them.
 
I must ship it out of the island which makes it prohibitively expensive at the moment. I will still have to outsource all drive level cases, but I want to deal with data and disk level cases in house. Thank you for your feedback though.
 
In that case, I would look for a used DDI3.

Edit: BTW, the PC3K is licensed to individuals, and is not transferrable--which is one of the things about it that makes it a risky purchase if you are not sure of the market potential or your ability to succeed in the DR business. DFL licenses are transferrable. DFL also has a DFL-DE, which is identical to a DFL-DDP except it's USB 2.0 instead of USB 3.0. Slow as mollases on large drives but still gets the job done and also comes with the common firmware repair features, which solve many problems without requiring a separate firmware tool. It's much cheaper than a DDP 3.0 and you can upgrade to the DDP whenever you are ready, for the difference in price plus shipping.
 
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If there isn't enough data recovery work on the island to pay for the tools, you may need to rethink if you want to offer the service or charge higher rates.

I'd just start with a deepspar imager and partner with another lab off the island.

Luke
 
Luke, Larry,
Thank you for your advice. I am still trying to do the math to make sure equipment will pay for itself soon. I recently saw that Deepspar released a new product. Rapidspar. From what I read it looks like a good compromise for me. And the price is more affordable. However I didn't find any reviews or hands on experience by anyone. Did anyone try it yet? http://rapidspar.com/

George
 
It was just released, so I doubt anyone has had a chance to check it out thoroughly, unless they were a beta tester. The only date I can find associated with the news release on DeepSpar's site, was the following in the source code.
In October, 2015 these considerations led to the launch of RapidSpar, a project that embeds DeepSpar’s extensive data recovery expertise into an easily accessible, cloud-based format. RapidSpar’s unprecedented automation dramatically reduces expertise requirements and decreases total ownership cost so that part-time service providers can do more work in-house.
Click to expand...
 
You already know how great DDI is... I can't live without mine personally. In fact, I now have two, a DDI3 and DDI4. Amazing device, and I doubt anything else compares, especially not for significantly less investment...
 
George Stobbart said:
I must ship it out of the island which makes it prohibitively expensive at the moment. I will still have to outsource all drive level cases, but I want to deal with data and disk level cases in house. Thank you for your feedback though.
Click to expand...
Just partner with a professional lab, unless you have the time and $$$ to do it right, I just got a commission check for $129 from my partner, pretty nice for just sending a email!
 
ell said:
Just partner with a professional lab, unless you have the time and $$$ to do it right, I just got a commission check for $129 from my partner, pretty nice for just sending a email!
Click to expand...
I'm not a big fan of the referral/commission cheque, though it is nice to receive a cheque for doing almost nothing. But, here is my reasoning:

1. Administrative nightmare (but, that is not your problem, it is the problem of the labs offering it)
2. Referring a client directly to the clean room lab possibly loses related work that comes from data recovery cases, such as new hard drive, new computer, data transfer back to new system, backup solutions and so on. This will depend on if they are an existing client or a new client.
3. By outsource to the lab yourself, you are able to control your client's experience. You, as their tech, should be able to better explain the recovery diagnosis and help your client decide if their data is worth the price.
4. Most clients don't even want to know how to remove a hard drive and ship it into a lab and would prefer to pay you do that for them.

That said, it is better to refer a client to a data recovery lab than to destroy your client's data by "trying" to do it yourself, at the expense of their data.
 
@ell.
Don't forget that Dominica is an Island country. My closest "Outsource" will be in States and will cost a lot. None of my clients have that much money to pay. Saying that, I already decided to go for a RapidSpar. I was convinced after watching the video on the bottom of this page http://rapidspar.com/why.html I already got the shipping info. I will let you know once I get it and give a try. If it does what it says it does, that's all I need.
 
I find that HDClone does a better job than ddrescue and it is not that expensive and does not hammer sectors i have had great success with it if i cannot run it on the drive then i outsource the drive to professional data recovery, depends on how critical the data is.
 
Galdorf said:
I find that HDClone does a better job than ddrescue and it is not that expensive and does not hammer sectors i have had great success with it if i cannot run it on the drive then i outsource the drive to professional data recovery, depends on how critical the data is.
Click to expand...
My concern with HDClone is that it might be limited to large block sizes and doesn't appear to keep a log. But, never using the program, perhaps you can answer the questions.

1. Is there a log so that you can repower the computer and pickup where you left off, without having to re-read the same sectors twice?
2. Do you know if it is able to dig down to a single sector when it comes to read errors? Most programs are limited to the block size limitations of the OS and a single unreadable sector results in an entire block of sectors not being read...as is nice illustrated with the RapidSpar video.
3. Do you boot the program in its own environment or is it running from within Windows? If within Windows, how are you preventing windows from trying to mount, read and write to the patient drive?

That all said, the program seems to have a lot of nice features and looks to be a lot better than most software imaging programs. I might have to invest $150 in the new year to buy a copy to play with....though, I'll stick to my hardware imagers for client projects.

Thanks for pointing it out.
 
Galdorf said:
I find that HDClone does a better job than ddrescue and it is not that expensive and does not hammer sectors
Click to expand...

How does it not hammer sectors? It sends read commands to read the drive. When a read command falls on a bad sector, the drive will go into busy state for 3-7 seconds (during which it does not accept any further read commands), while hammering the bad sector with hundreds of internal read attempts. What exactly does this tool do to stop this process from happening?
 
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