What/how do you charge for a data backup and recovery

[tankman1989]

I have a client who seems to destroy hardware (especially hard drives). I have probably sold him 5-6 drives in 2 years and transfered 2Tb of data. Much of this transfer is done by hand with manual recovery with Helix or some other forensic software after the hard drive is no longer recognizable in a Windows OS.

All this is time consuming and I have been very lenient with this person as he is a friend. I have been looking at these procedures as training and experience building.

After selling him numerous external backup solutions, he still doe not do things properly. He will wait 6 months to do a backup and his computer will fail. Then I come to the rescue.

This time I am going to have to charge as I think it may teach him a lesson. I had to back up 200Gb+ on this last occasion after his RAID1 array became corrupt (I don't know how it did..). He also has knocked his MyBook off his desk (3 1/2 ft fall) and is ****** that the computer doesn't recognize it anymore. He thinks it isn't his fault. I explain G force and he still says it should work. He is a landscaper by profession so he doesn't really understand the intricacies of miniaturized electronics.

What is your standard fee for data backup? Do you charge by the hour, by the Gb or what? Is there a different rate for recovery? If I take a drive and put it in my service PC and use an Esata connection, I can tansfer 4-7x faster than a USB2.0 transfer.

What do you do and what are your fees?

 

[ESIT251]

I have a data recovery in progress as I write this. For residential clients - currently charging a fixed fee of $175 for an off-site data recovery of corrupted data. I will burn up to 4 DVDs - if over then I will deliver the data and transfer off an external hard drive. $65 an hour for onsite data backup - 1 hour minimum.

 

[Kenhelms]

I give estimates before the work is done, pricing is all over the board.

It can be anywhere from $50(basic easy OS failure, memory card wipe, etc) to $1k-$10K+ on a station if its a indepth investigation recovery. Its hard to give a set price because they are so dependent on variables.

Physical recovery is a whole different beast from 400-3K depending on the recovery.

 

[dhrandy]

This is for residential.

DATA BACKUP
Data Recovery / Data Transfer $69.99
Automated Data Backup Setup $79.99
One Time Data Backup - 4.7 (1 DVD) $59.99
One Time Data Backup - 9.4GB (2 DVDs) $89.99
One Time Data Backup - Unlimited $129.99

www.gwhizpc.com/pricing.html

 

[NickCat11]

My prices fluctuate as well. Recovery starts at $85 and goes up from there. Regular backup and data transfer start at $65 and go up from there.

 

[MichianaComputers2]

This is for residential.

DATA BACKUP
Data Recovery / Data Transfer $69.99
Automated Data Backup Setup $79.99
One Time Data Backup - 4.7 (1 DVD) $59.99
One Time Data Backup - 9.4GB (2 DVDs) $89.99
One Time Data Backup - Unlimited $129.99

www.gwhizpc.com/pricing.html

What about corrupted participations or drives going bad or ones to save the data you run over and over, upside down or refrigerated. What do you charge for a raw recovery that takes 28 hours? is that still $69.99?

 

[MichianaComputers2]

I have a client who seems to destroy hardware (especially hard drives). I have probably sold him 5-6 drives in 2 years and transfered 2Tb of data.....

Wow. 5 or 6 drives in 2 years? Are they really bad? Or did he just scramble the tables somehow.

If you are running a raid1 and one disk went bad then the other disk should still be good. Thats the idea of a read1 to have a redundant disk. Could you not just rebuild the damaged disk from the redundant good one?

You should charge for your services, but not to teach anyone a lesson. If anyone learned a lesson here it should be you for not charging in the first place.

For the best interest of your client, you need to find out why he is going through 5 or 6 hard drives in two years and correct that problem.

 

[MichianaComputers2]

I have a client ...After selling him numerous external backup solutions, he still doe not do things properly.

Why would you sell someone more than one "backup solution." One back up program should be sufficient. Which programs do you have installed on his system. More than one, could they be conflicting?

 

[dhrandy]

What about corrupted participations or drives going bad or ones to save the data you run over and over, upside down or refrigerated. What do you charge for a raw recovery that takes 28 hours? is that still $69.99?

That's a special circumstance. I've had non of those as of yet.

 

[Charlotte PC]

Yeah well if you advertise one price and charge another, you are going to have some pretty ****** off customers.

I don't see any problem with advertising specific prices for backup/restore services as long as you have a dialogue with your customer beforehand explaining that these prices are for basic backup, etc.

If you take your car for a $29 A/C tune up and they find bigger problems, do you expect them to replace your entire A/C system for $29?

 

[dhrandy]

Yeah well if you advertise one price and charge another, you are going to have some pretty ****** off customers.

Like I said, never had a problem. Moving on...

 

[Charlotte PC]

That is the most absurd data recovery prices I've ever seen.
Last month I had to save data from a destroyed laptop drive, what are you going to charge for that?? 60 bucks?

Quoted from your web site:
...$125.00 flat fee for major services that take more than 30 minutes
Laptop Screen replacement, Virus removal, Windows recovery, etc....

So, if you have a customer that wants you to work on something that ends up taking 16 hours, your fee is $125.00?

 

[Charlotte PC]

Haha at least get it right.

"$125 for major work like screen replacement, hardware repairs, windows restore and reinstallations, etc. These prices do not include parts and do not cover advanced services such as data recovery or networking."


nice try.

I just quoted exactly from your site. I was responding to your comment ..."Yeah well if you advertise one price and charge another, you are going to have some pretty ****** off customers"...

Sorry, just splitting hairs I guess.

 

[MichianaComputers2]

That's a special circumstance. I've had non of those as of yet.

I had one where I had to turn the drive over and lay it in different positions to get different parts of the data. I could here very bad noises coming from the drive as it died. It took all night and the next day to do the raw recovery disregarding the formats on the drive. We have recovered data from a drive that was formated twice once in NTFS and once in Linux.

It can be a lot of work. We are not to the stage of data recovery yet where we take apart the drives and move the platters to a better drive, but we have made arrangements to be able to contract that work out if we need to.

 

[noah]

I charge standard hourly rates with a 1 hour minimum. $70/hr residential. $85/hr business.

 

[dhrandy]

but we have made arrangements to be able to contract that work out if we need to.

We have too. I always explain that there is no guarantee that I can recover the data. I had one last week I couldn't recover and gave them a quote to get it sent off.

I'm working on another one right now that may have the same issue. We'll see.

 

[tankman1989]

Wow. 5 or 6 drives in 2 years? Are they really bad? Or did he just scramble the tables somehow.

If you are running a raid1 and one disk went bad then the other disk should still be good. Thats the idea of a read1 to have a redundant disk. Could you not just rebuild the damaged disk from the redundant good one?

You should charge for your services, but not to teach anyone a lesson. If anyone learned a lesson here it should be you for not charging in the first place.

For the best interest of your client, you need to find out why he is going through 5 or 6 hard drives in two years and correct that problem.

The drives were bad. The were not recognizable by any hardware, or they were on their last legs (only Helix would recognize and transfer from them) when I received them. He tends to be a little rough with the drives. He knocked one off his desk while it was writing and couldn't understand why it would not work anymore yet he has another drive that he throws in his backpack and is "really rough" with it and it has been fine. I told him that when a drive is active and the heads are not parked, dropping a drive can destroy the heads and damage the platters. Even after this he still thinks the drive he knocked off his desk while writing is a POS while his Maxtor that travels with him is golden, lol

 

[tankman1989]

Why would you sell someone more than one "backup solution." One back up program should be sufficient. Which programs do you have installed on his system. More than one, could they be conflicting?

I either did not convey the situation correctly or it was misinterpreted. I was talking about external drives, or a RAID array + external. I think he has gone through 4 externals in 2 years, one or two internals and now is on his latest 500Gb RAID 1 array.

He is using the software that is packaged with the externals as it is free. It is a 500GB drive, the same as the two partitions and is supposed to backup both drives.