I'm a big fan of technology, and I tend to place a bit too much trust into it. Every document I wrote, every photo I took, every letter I ever wrote - in other words, EVERYTHING I ever did - I had it stored on my computer. I played it pretty safe, though - I backed up all this valuable data on a regular schedule and had the data stored on a RAID system just to be double sure. I was absolutely prepared for a disaster.
Needless to say, I was devastated when I managed to lose all of it, including the backups. This should have been impossible! But alas - the RAID controller was faulty, and it corrupted the data on every drive, every single one of them.
I had little choice but to seek the services of a professional data recovery. I chose Secure Data Recovery Services of Washington DC, in case that could not be inferred, and for the benefit of others like me, I'm going to summarize my experience with them.
I called their office and explained to the dude on the other side of the line what had happened. This dude, as I'm sure he was trained to do, acknowledged the gravity of the situation and made a perfunctory attempt to reassure me. I drove the computer to their office. They told me there that RAID recovery is a much more complicated process than a standard hard drive, which I translated as ""we're going to sit on your drive for weeks, recover nothing, and pilfer your wallet mercilessly,"" to which I obliged since I had few other options.
But, in case this also could not be inferred from the rating, neither of these things really happened. They called me in two hours, after they finished doing their diagnostics, and stated that there was a good chance that my data could be recovered. They gave me an estimated price and how long I would have to wait, both of which turned out to be pretty accurate, I guess, at least more accurate than my cynical predictions were. But of course, the most important part is - were they successful? Well? almost. They told me there were major chunks which they couldn't recover; they were as good as lost. But they were able to get the majority of it, which I guess is good considering that I braced myself for far worse. In any case, I'm convinced that they got everything that was possible. I got all my photos back, but some documents, especially the most recent ones, were gone. They couldn't get all my music - again, it seemed to depend on how long I had them, as some of the most recent files were gone.
Anyways, this is much, much longer than I anticipated - the bottom line is, Secure Data Recovery Services of Washington DC is a decent company, roughly the kind that a non-cynical person would expect it to be.
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