Your hard drive is what houses the most valuable data you have. Your business files, current projects and past records are stored here. And yet, as with anything in the digital space, there is the potential for data loss. A single hard drive to crash, physical damage, or system failure is all it takes.
When you dealing with hard drive recovery, three things are important: getting back as much data as you can, getting it back inexpensively, and getting it back quickly. The inexpensive, proactive solution to all of this is to have a cloud backup solution in place to backup all of your business data. However, if it’s already happened, there are still a few things you can do to cut down your hard drive recovery cost retroactively.
Compare Services
Nowadays, there’s a significant amount of competition in the hard drive recovery area. Fortunately, this has pushed prices down significantly and made it easier for those who have issues with their hard drive to get it repaired at a lower cost. While part of the cost will always depend on the severity of the damage or loss and the labor and materials needed to make the repair, customers now have the option to shop around. General prices have also been reduced due to the fact that recovering data from an affected hard drive has become far easier over the last several years.
Get an Analysis & Avoid Broad Quotes
While many professionals offer free or low-cost assessments for your hard drive recovery issues, it’s best to nail down exactly what the issue with your hard drive is, how it can be fixed, and if your data is capable of being recovered. While many computer users are not familiar enough with their systems to analyze or entirely understand the issue themselves, it’s important to make sure the company you’re working with uses specific terminology and can give a more detailed estimate about what each necessary process would cost. Broad estimates can lead to overcharging and in turn, overpaying.
Also, it’s important that when you get a list of services and parts that you do a bit of research of your own, looking up the average cost of the materials that are going to need to be replaced and possibly even the services that they’re suggesting. This allows you to be more knowledgeable as a consumer and to make sure you’re being charged a fair price for your hard drive recovery.
Leave Recovery to the Experts
Attempting to hack at your hard drive when you have limited technical experience is a great way to make the situation even worse. Do so, and you run the risk of losing more data and making the recovery process more expensive for yourself, if not impossible.
For one, recovering data from a laptop can be difficult. You may need to take the laptop apart, remove the hard drive and attach it to a desktop computer to search for your surviving data. Not to mention, you may have to replace the laptop’s hard drive entirely in order to save the computer’s usability. If you take your laptop into a data recovery professional, they’ll need to take your laptop apart as well in order to be able to work on the hard drive — this disassembly process may incur some additional fees.
While accessing a hard drive on a desktop computer may be easier, as it’s more accessible compared to a laptop, it should still be avoided unless you know what you’re getting yourself into.
The best way to reduce hard drive recovery cost in either situation is to hand it over to the professionals, take the loss as an expensive lesson learned, and plan for next time.
You should always backup your data to multiple locations in order to avoid the need for data recovery services. Data backup creates copies of your data that you can rely on and restore in the event of a data loss scenario.
Cloud backup is the best form of data backup a business can utilize. Cloud backup keeps data recovery where it belongs — at your fingertips.
When you backup your business data with cloud backup, it’s kept in a secure, off-site location with multiple levels of security safeguards — keeping your data available and accessible to you no matter what data disaster you face. If your hard drive crashes, experiences physical damage, or is stolen, you can restore your data exactly as it was before by restoring it to the repaired device, or by restoring it to a brand new one.
By far, the best way to avoid high costs when it comes to hard drive recovery is to make sure you properly backup all of your important information and have it stored somewhere that’s easily accessible. Cloud backup services like those offered by Nordic Backup can provide peace of mind and ease the strain on your wallet if your hard drive ever crashes.
