HD rescue for $99

[Dave Bourke]

I've done business in the past with these people - PowerbookMedic - and they're good. Got an email from them today advertising a new service - hard drive salvage. Up to 8GB of files recovered for $99, with free shipping both ways, and a thumb drive containing the rescued files thrown in as well. Sounds like a great deal to me! Obviously, this only applies to drives that have not been persuaded with a lump hammer.

Worth a bookmark for that rainy day, I think:

http://www.powerbookmedic.com/hard_driv ... covery.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Kind regards.

[magicd]

I had a drive crash last year that was a result of sectors going bad in the directory. I tried a few different rescue apps but one really came through for me:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/s ... tware.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Dave

[Jim]

Just a head's up, in case you ever mistakenly deleted files and emptied the trash:

Your files aren't gone, the header describing them is. It's like peeling the label off a videotape, and putting it on a shelf for later reuse.

Once you realize what you've done, DO NOT WRITE ANY MORE DATA to that drive.

If you get recovery software, but be sure to put it on a different drive. Most recovery programs can't recover files from the disk the application is running on, and may need a different drive on which to write the recovered files. And you might over-write your mistakenly erased data with the recovery software. That would be both tragic, and ironic.

This mostly refers to people using one disk for OS and audio files. That's not the best idea, but it's not verboten the way it used to be, under pre-OSX. It's still a pretty good idea to put your media files on a disk separate from your OS & applications. And it's a good idea to backup all your disks regularly. If you keep recent clones, you'll have less need for file-recovery programs.

I say all this with the understanding that there we may be talking about drives that won't mount, and that's a different issue from data-recovery.