Recently, another hard drive manufacture announced they would begin offering a data protection plan in the United States and in Canada. The program is simple enough: if you lose your data from an enrolled hard drive within the 2 or 3 year term, the hard drive manufacture will use reasonable efforts to attempt to recover your data. Costs for the plan in Canada range from $40 to $90 depending on the type of hard drive and the number of years of coverage. This is not a new concept, similar data protection plans have existed for over 10 years.

So what’s wrong with these plans? … I am NOT a fan of data protection plans for 3 important reasons:

1. False sense of Security: Let’s start by looking at the basic concept of data protection plans and what they offer. While called a data protection plan, there really is no plan to protect your data! The plan is once your data is damaged or lost the plan provider will see IF they can recover it. The fact that it may not be recoverable is buried in the terms and conditions. Many people will miss this important point buried in the fine print and walk away with a false sense of security that their data is safe. As a result, many people may feel they can bypass backing up their data and this is the real danger. People WILL lose their data!

2. Oops we can’t help you, here’s your money back: These protection plans take your money to protect your data. Then when the time comes to perform and it’s discovered the data is not recoverable “using reasonable means”, they simply refund you initial premium. With most insurance policies if they cannot fix your car, they pay you its value. What’s the value of your data? Imagine you’re in a car accident with your brand new car and your insurance company decides to return your 2 months of premiums versus fixing your car. To add further insult to injury, some data protection plans reserve the right to refund your plan fee in the form of a Gift Card. Oh Yippy!

3. Are you getting the best effort?: Attempting data recovery is often very expensive. For example, to attempt to recover the data from a 3TB external hard drive that’s been dropped, will typically require 1-3 new parts drives and a week or more of computer time to image the hard drive. I believe a technician encountering this situation may be prone to declare the case unrecoverable and simply refund the money versus spending hundreds of dollars on parts and investing a lot of time for a chance to recover the data. What real incentive is there for the data recovery company to spend money and try to recover your data? Now, if there was a large payout of perhaps 5,000 dollars if they could NOT recover the data, then I would believe there would be an incentive to recover the data. For this reason in particular, I believe that an independent data recovery service will try much harder and be much more successful in recovering your data because they have a huge incentive as they won’t get paid unless they are successful.

So, if you find yourself being pressured to enroll in a ”data protection plan” be sure to consider all the facts and don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by a clever marketing program. If you’ve encountered a data loss situation and your company can’t live without the data, do your due diligence and entrust your data recovery to a professional data recovery service.

 

 

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