data loss Archives - Memofix's Data Recovery Blog

Data Recovery pricing and why we’re NOT the cheapest

May 27, 2026

Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We are constantly reminded by our clients of just how expensive data recovery can be. No matter how much we attempt to prepare clients, many are still outright shocked at the cost. I can sympathize with many of our clients as I’ve experienced the same sensation at least a few times over the last year; like when I brought my car in for a simple brake job and the bill surged to almost a $1000; or when my furnace started making knocking noises and I was quoted over $1200 for a new blower motor. So what makes data recovery so expensive ….. or is it?

Just as your local auto service would not charge you the same price for an oil change as they would for a new exhaust system, Data Recovery pricing varies greatly. Some recoveries may take 20 minutes to resolve, while others can be on-going for a week or longer. Some problems can be handled by a junior data recovery technician, while others may require our resident genius to step in. Data loss may be the result of the accidental deletion of a few files, the dropping of a laptop or the failure of multiple hard drives from a 12 drive RAID array. Obviously the skill set and resources required to bring a crashed hard drive back to life or to reconstruct a damaged RAID array are much greater than the expertise required recovering a few deleted files.

Data Recovery is a service business with no guarantees. Sometime the data is just not recoverable no matter how much effort and parts we throw at it. And of course nobody likes to pay you for NOT recovering their data. So most reputable data recovery companies have adopted a somewhat unique service guarantee, where if we cannot recover the data you need, you will not be charged a dime. Consequently when data recovery jobs are quoted, the odds of us being able to recover the data successfully are built into the equation. In other words if we estimate the odds of a successful recovery are only 10%, then the recovery case will be quoted quite high. Looking at it slightly differently, if we attempt 10 such cases, we will be successful and get paid for just one of them. On the other hand, if our experience determines a recovery case is recoverable in 99% of the time, than the cost may be quite reasonable as there will be no risk factor built in.

What is you data worth? The most expensive data recovery I’ve been involved in was from a large world class hospital in one of the southern U.S. states. The hospital had been downloading all of its medical images, from ultrasounds to MRIs, to one server that was supposedly being backed up every night. When the server’s RAID array crashed one rainy night, they quickly learned their backup tapes were useless. The cost to re-book and recreate the over 200,000 images would have been in the millions of dollars, and many of them could never be replicated as the patients condition had changed. The job took us 3 months with a team of 4 techs and we ended up charging somewhere just over a $100K. And imagine this: we actually LOST money on it!

Providing a thorough and world class recovery service demands an investment in high end people and expensive equipment. Yes we could do data recovery cheaper like many on the web that scoop off the easiest cases and declare the rest unrecoverable (a real crime and disservice to everyone). Or we could charge ridiculous pricing like the big boys of the industry. But, doing just the easy cases so we are super profitable, or quoting everything super high so that when we do get an approval we make big money, is NOT our philosophy. We want to provide every client with the best chance of getting their data back and at a reasonable cost. Reasonable must mean we are able to be profitable enough to stay in the business and profitable enough to continue to invest in our people, our equipment and our processes. We have consciously set our pricing to be somewhere between these two extremes. A Guide to Data Recovery Pricing

So, if you find yourself in need of a data recovery service, please take the time to consider the value of your data. If it’s not worth much, go ahead and take a chance on a cheap fly by night recovery service or call you geeky brother-in-law Stan. But if you or your company can’t live without your data, don’t waste the first and best chance of a successful recovery with anyone but a professional recovery service like Memofix. … David Foster

External Hard Drives … SUV or Porsche?

March 4, 2026

Claremont, Ontario, Canada. At least every week we receive a few recoveries where the drive will not spin up. The problem is a physical issue where the spindle motor that spins the hard drive’s platters is seized. The cost of recovering from such a situation is quite expensive, but it may be possible to avoid such a dilemma.

Manufactures design external enclosures that mount the drive either vertically or horizontally as shown in the picture below. Due to the high centre of gravity with the vertical units, they are extremely susceptible to being knocked over, which in turn may cause your hard drive’s spindle to seize. Avoid buying one of these vertically mounted external hard drive enclosure if at all possible.

External Cases

Vertically mounted (SUV) Horizontally mounted (Porsche)

While it’s true hard drives are designed to be mounted either vertically or horizontally, they are not designed to withstand much shock while operating. Approximately 10 years ago when hard drives were still designed with standard ball bearings in their spindle motors, they rarely seized. But in the quest for better performance, drives began using fluid dynamic bearings. With FD bearings, the metal balls were replaced with a layer of liquid. While there is no doubt that these bearings were superior in performance, they do have the disadvantage that under shock situations the fluid dynamic bearings can catastrophically seize. And that is what we are seeing so much of today. http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-hard-drive.php … David Foster

FREE Data Recovery

February 26, 2026

Markham, Ontario, Canada. This is a story I love to tell. It reveals much of the human psyche and I find it fascinating

Back in the 90’s when Data Recovery type services were first starting to mature I was working for one of the pioneers of the industry, Nick Majors. Nick was a man of unquestionable integrity and honesty. So it was no surprise that nothing perturbed him more at the time than the massive influx of companies that suddenly “claimed” to be experts in data recovery. From cases that were sent to us for a 2^nd opinion and through our own secret shopper program, where we sent data recovery cases to these so called experts, it became obvious that there were a lot of unscrupulous and opportunistic villains infecting the data recovery business. They made their money by getting in as many jobs as they could, charging an evaluation fee for each one, and then recovering the 10-15% of the cases that were the easiest (skimming the cream off the top as we referred to it back then) . They would do the cases where no parts and little intelligence were required … basically the cases that could easily be handled by any commercially available recovery software. Those they couldn’t recover were declared unrecoverable and the client was told they were out of luck.

So it was decided that we had a responsibility to save the world’s data from all these crooks and make some money off it at the same time. With huge fanfare and press releases, we announced our FREE-FIX program. Basically, we would recover people’s data for free IF it was a simple problem that we could resolve in 15 minutes or less. This would include logical problems with the file system, deleted files, formatted drives and pcb problems for common drives we had in stock. The program was intended for consumer users and was available on single hard drives with Windows or MAC data only. If we were successful, the client only paid for the return shipping and the media to put the data on. If the case was not eligible for FREE-FIX, we would provide the client with a no obligation quote for further recovery attempts.

We thought if we took the high road and did the easy stuff for free, we would kill this growing segment of con artists as they would not be able to survive without the easy jobs. And of course we also hoped that many of the ineligible cases would be approved for escalation into more desirable expensive jobs. We really felt that we would gain such a good reputation from this program that it would pay us back a thousand times.

Boy, were we wrong !!!! Yes most of the owners of the cases that qualified for FREE-FIX loved us. But the other 85% of the people were absolutely outraged at us. We were suddenly bombarded with irate clients wanting to rip a strip off of us. Those that we tried to “up-sell” because theirs’ was not a simple/free recovery, largely declined as they felt we were using bait and switch tactics. Even some of the 100 or so people who qualified for FREE-FIX every month thought we must be making money off the return media and the shipping. Shortly after the 1^st month, the FREE-FIX experiment was cancelled and quickly disappeared into the growing mist of the World Wide Web, never to be heard of again. … David Foster

Tips for keeping your data safe

January 25, 2026

If you’ve spent any time on the various data recovery websites you’ve no doubt come across lots of advice on what to do once you have a data loss situation. Our website also has a page on it https://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/protect-your-data. But I’ve always felt the best advice would be to avoid such an unpleasant experience in the 1st place. So after some interesting discussions with our data recovery technicians, we have created a list of useful tips and suggestions that may keep you from losing your data in the first place.

1. Start by choosing the safest storage device you can. Here are some specific recommendations that may help …

Don’t buy the latest and greatest hard drive. Stick with a true and tested hard drive model that has been around a while. Not only will the bad models have been discontinued, but any bugs or known issues on seasoned models, will have been addressed. Search the web to discover problems other users may be having with a specific drive model. For example, don’t buy the first helium filled hard drives until time has tested them 1st.
Don’t use an old hard drive. If your drive is older than 5 years consider replacing it. And no matter how old your drive is, if it starts acting up in any way, whether making a strange noise once in a while or whether read errors keep popping up, make a copy of your data and get rid of it, before it fails.
Buy the lightest hard drive you can! Huh? Preferably one with a single disk. Sounds strange you say? Less mass requires less power = less heat & less stress combined with less parts = less crashes. When a hard drive requires 4 disks to keep up with the maximum capacity being offered by the competition, you know they’re likely stretching the design limitations.
Consider using a laptop drive in your desktop. Laptop drives by design are meant to take more physical abuse and are designed to be light in weight, low in power needs and quiet in operation.
If you’re using an SSD or Solid State Drive, ensure you regularly backup. SSD drives use extremely complicated and always proprietary methods of distributing the data across multiple memory chips. The point is, if your SSD becomes damaged, recovering your data may be very very very expensive … if it is even possible. I also wonder how an SSD will stand up to a power surge. If a hard drive gets a power surge the electronics get fried but the physically stored data remains intact. In an SSD, fried electronics could very well be your critical data disappearing into the cosmos.
Use USB Flash Sticks only for transferring data from one computer to another. Do not use them as temporary or permanent storage devices. They are very susceptible to both physical damage and ESD damage. Every few months a student walks in the door with the sole copy of their thesis on an inaccessible USB flash drive.

2. Then maintain and protect your storage device or hard drive with these suggestions

Connect your computer to a UPS or surge suppressor. This simple device can prevent electrical surge damage to your drive as well as preventing damage to any open files or the file system itself should your power source be interrupted.
Ensure your system has adequate ventilation. One of the most common causes of drive failure is overheating, so make sure your computer’s fans work or even consider adding an additional one.
Use an antivirus program and keep updated with the latest virus definitions.
Be gentle! A hard drive is a delicate device. Be sure it has a chance to stop spinning before attempting to move your desktop or laptop computer. And be extremely careful not to knock over any external hard drives you may have attached. Every week we see damaged external drives where the external case was merely tipped over while it was running.

3. And finally protect your data just in case bad things happen!

Backup the important stuff! Yeah, yeah … we all know this and yet few of us do it, me included. If it’s important to you, prove it and back it up.
Backup to the Cloud. While it may still be slow and cost a few bucks, a cloud backup service of at least your most critical stuff is an excellent idea. And most of us need not worry about the prying eyes of the United States NSA.
Don’t Backup Archival Data to USB Flash Sticks! The data is stored electronically and unless the device is re-charged periodically by plugging it into a powered computer, the data will start to leak away over time. If you put your data on a USB stick and throw it in a drawer for a year or two, odds are your data will be gone or seriously corrupted. Some authorities on the subject claim your data could be in jeopardy in as soon as 3 months if not re-charged.
Defrag often! If the data is contiguous (all stored sequentially together) there are ways to rip off data files even if the drive’s file system or “index of file locations” is totally missing. Be sure to use you computers defragmentation utility on a regular basis.
Don’t encrypt your data, unless absolutely necessary. Even if you never forget the password, a failing hard drive combined with encryption means the odds of getting your data back are slim. If you must use encryption, use it only on individual files that must be guarded at no cost.

While it’s virtually impossible to be 100% diligent in safeguarding our data at all times, hopefully a few of these tips will lower the chances of you losing your data. But if all else fails and you find yourself in a data loss predicament, please give us a call.

(this blog post while slightly modified, was originally published on January 25th, 2010)