FREECOM 3-YEAR DATA RECOVERY SERVICE ONLY £24.95 INC. VAT

Slackworth

Slackworth

Slackworth

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If you value your data then check out this new offering from Freecom. As long as your existing or new hard drive works at the point of registration, Freecom will provide you with 3 years data recovery service for just under £25.

Freecom Data Recovery Service @ £24.95 inc VAT

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There is always a possibility that your computer’s hard drive or your external hard drive may crash. A hard drive crash would mean that you lose all data that is stored on that drive. Imagine your digital photos, your music or video collection, your important documents…. All gone! With Freecom’s Data Recovery Service/Anti Datastrophe System a hard drive crash is not the end of the world. Even if your computer does not recognize the hard drive anymore, the data usually is still present on the drive and thereby might still be recoverable in Freecom's laboratory. Registering for Freecom’s Data Recovery Service means a safe feeling for you. For a period of 3 years, you have the right to one data recovery of your hard drive in case it has crashed.

- Total Peace of mind for the next 3 years
- Reclaim lost files, photos, videos & music
- Can be used for any Hard Drive brands

HOW IT WORKS
1. Purchase the Data Recovery Service package
2. Register online at www.freecom.com/datarecovery, including details of the hard drive for which you register the service. The service covers one data recovery of one device for a period of 3 years, valid only after registration.
3. Should your hard drive crash, contact Freecom online at www.freecom.com/datarecovery or telephone via one of Freecom's local Service Centres
4. After receiving a confirmation e-mail from Freecom, you can ship the drive to the laboratory free of charge, using a Freecom shipping label
5. Upon arrival at the laboratory, a technician will send you a diagnostic report via e-mail, including a list of recoverable files
6. After your confirmation, the laboratory will attempt to recover your data and send the recovered data back

Only £24.95 inc VAT.

ORDER NOW
 
Their website states that sometimes it's not possible to recover any data. This probably means you should change "the laboratory will recover your data" to "the laboratory will attempt to recover your data". Further, they don't provide a list of what disasters they are able to deal with, and which they are not. Nor do they make any claims regarding the integrity of the recovered data.

I can't see it written anywhere that you will receive a refund if they fail in this task, nor any information on what can make the data irrecoverable. As such I suspect this isn't worth the paper it's written on. Can you provide any information suggesting otherwise?

I can't imagine this can be considered an alternative to backups.

LazaRus said:
At LazaRus we undertake to make the most advanced technology in data recovery available to you. The current state of the art does not allow us to ensure the recovery of your data. Your data may have got irretrievably lost.
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edit: I've emailed Freecom asking for terms and conditions, so hopefully should manage to answer my own question in a few days time.
 
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I was interested in this a while ago: Could this possibly be used to get a cheap data recovery on a drive which has already failed? I don't understand how they could even check? :l
 
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The Mad Rapper said:
It won't cover physical failures. Dismantling a drive, removing the platters and placing them on a recovery unit in a clean room costs thousands of pounds.
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It does. I had a customers' drive fail with mission critical data on it. We sent the drive to them, they dismantled it by removing the platters and placing them on a recovery unit in a clean room as you have said. It doesn't cost thousands of pounds now, it used to but recovery is a big business these days. They can offer this service at this price point because it is an insurance policy so you are not paying for the repair as an emergency service, but you are paying for the risk of such an evantuality - just like a car crash. This makes sense for them as a business model because they can collect revenue on the probability that a failure 'might' occur rather than it actualy occurring. Of course they can still charhe what they like for on demand recovery because they have you by the balls. The question is would you really want someone to sift through all your data and recover it?!? :D I keep a '**** drive' which is seperate and it will get a hammer through it when it dies ;)

The police use several companies like this for forensic recovery of pc hard drives and security dvr's. I got another one of my csutomers' drives recovered last year and it cost £300 for one hundred gigabytes of data. That included them stripping/remounting the platters, but the only extra was the cost of transferring the data to another drive supplied by us which was about £18.

Also worth noting is that this only covers ONE drive, so data across a RAID set would cost you twice and there may be clauses about RAID.. it doesn't tell you a lot does it?

Also wonder if this insurance type recovery would cover SSD's? I know they retain data when the 'expire' but if the controller went it would still be unreadable. Again, can't see anything listed.

NOTE TO OVERCLOCKERS.. Have you guys thought about extended warranties or insurance policies on high-end machines? There must be a market for this as a lot of people (some of my customers) are parting with up to £10k for a system these days.
 
rush_syndrome said:
It doesn't cost thousands of pounds now, it used to but recovery is a big business these days.
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Yes it does. I work in the industry so know precisely how much it costs - it's ridiculous actually.

They can offer this service at this price point because it is an insurance policy so you are not paying for the repair as an emergency service, but you are paying for the risk of such an evantuality - just like a car crash. This makes sense for them as a business model because they can collect revenue on the probability that a failure 'might' occur rather than it actualy occurring. Of course they can still charhe what they like for on demand recovery because they have you by the balls. The question is would you really want someone to sift through all your data and recover it?!? :D I keep a '**** drive' which is seperate and it will get a hammer through it when it dies ;)
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So the simple fact is then that it isn't the same service at all. I am surprised to read they de-construct the drive in a clean room for that price - good for them though. I don't see any of my fellow Forensic Investigators using them for any evidential data recovery - we need complete confidentiality, an evidential continuity trail and super fast turn around. As this shows, you can get the work done, but not to the same standards and not in the same time span. I'm sure the companies we'd use might do it for £30 if we said "Just get it back to us when you can be arsed."


The police use several companies like this for forensic recovery of pc hard drives and security dvr's.
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No they don't.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom

Basically a room specially designed to drive out all the pollutants found in our environment. The tolerance on hard disks are so tight that if a small particle of dust came between the disk heads and platters, it could be enough to damage the surface (a.k.a. head crash). Not what you want when trying to recover an already-damaged drive.
 
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