Hard Drive Recovery Group Warns Customers Of Data And RAID Recovery Outsourcing in 2019

As the New Year approaches, Hard Drive Recovery Group, California's RAID recovery provider and the data recovery industry's price leader, warns that "data recovery outsourcing" cost customers thousands of dollars in 2018, with the trend potentially strengthening in 2019.

Mechanical hard drive failure, although not common in general, is an event that is basically inevitable for most hard drives. Much like any device with a mechanical base, repeated use over thousands of days will typically spell the end of most hard drives, often offering a negative surprise for users.

"If there is one thing that every data recovery customer has in common, it's that they weren't expecting a catastrophic disk failure," said Maureen Davies of Hard Drive Recovery Group. "This can lead to a panic decision in many cases, either when it comes to choosing a data recovery provider or in the actions taken after the disk has failed. Either way, it can get expensive."

While bad user decisions like attempting to perform DIY data recovery with additional drives or physically opening a hard disk drive can raise the cost of clean room data recovery by quite a lot, one of the worst decisions often comes when the user seeks a professional data recovery service.

"The interesting thing about many users that are facing a hard drive recovery job is that often, they tend to go local when seeking help," said Davies. "The sad issue here is that they typically start the search in a bad way - by looking for computer repair shops - when in reality those shops rarely actually perform on-site data recovery."

The result of this issue is that most computer repair shops will claim to offer professional data recovery services, when in reality they do not. Instead, these shops will take in a hard drive, and then merely re-ship it to the data recovery service they commonly use. From there, the shop merely manages the case and collects huge fees on top of the wholesale charge, making the job far less cost effective.

"As easy as taking a drive to your local big box store and dropping it off with their 'tech nerds' appears, it adds tremendous cost to an already pricey job," said Davies. "Meanwhile, going direct for hard drive recovery not only saves the customer money, but the extra time involved in shipping the drive off-site."

While making these mistakes with a simple hard drive recovery can be economically harsh, this is nothing compared to how bad it can get when a RAID array goes down. Many data recovery services do not even provide in-house RAID recovery, and in fact subcontract the job to another shop. As this line of outsourcers gets longer, the customer ends up paying the bills of each of them!

"RAID recovery from a multiple drive failure is one of those tasks again that everyone claims they can perform, but few actually do," said Davies. "In the end, when you're dealing with the loss of mission critical data, you need to be 100% sure that the company you are talking to is the one doing the work. Taking extra steps to research and call several providers can help anyone avoid this."

Hard Drive Recovery Group has long been the Southern California business community's go-to when it comes to RAID recovery and server repair. Equipped with a class 100 clean room as well as a team of data recovery engineers with well over 100 years of combined experience with RAID arrays, HDRG supports all major and most minor RAID server manufacturers, making it a one stop shop for RAID recovery.

"Some of the stories we hear about outsourced data recovery jobs from our customers are so brutal that they actually don't sound real," said Davies. "Information is power when it comes to data recovery, so ensuring you have done the due diligence pays off big time."