Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hard drive manufactures provide a warranty on their disk drives that will provide you with a new drive should yours happen to fail within the warranty period. However, none of these warranties can protect or replace your data should it become inaccessible or lost as a result of a failing hard drive or accidental damage. And in fact, the drive manufactures go out of their way to distance themselves as far away as possible from any liability for the data that is stored on their product. So why hasn’t someone offered insurance on the data that resides on your hard drive or other digital storage device. Simply put, it isn’t possible! Data is not always recoverable, no matter how much money one is willing to pay.
A few companies have attempted to sell “data recovery” type insurance but none would ever be so bold as to guarantee your data. Instead the few twisted souls that have ventured into the data recovery insurance game have chosen to repackage a similar type of insurance under the name of a data protection service.
About 5 years ago one of the laptop hard drive manufactures partnered with a data recovery company in offering this type of insurance. In such a plan, you are charged a small premium to cover the cost of “attempting” to recover your data should such a disaster befall you. There are no guarantees they will recover your data, only a promise to give it their best efforts. And if they’re not successful, there are no pay outs or compensation of any sort, other than possibly offering to insure your new replacement drive for free. Personally, I fail to see any incentive for the underlying data recovery company to give it much of an effort or expend any serious resources.
Many of us already have a home owner’s insurance policy that may provide coverage for data recovery services should you lose the PERSONAL data on your home computer. I was surprised to see my policy covers such losses up to $1500. Unfortunately there was a $500 deductible but at least I am covered for a serious recovery attempt at a relatively low recovery cost. You may want to check your policy or ask your insurance agent if you have coverage.
There is one external hard drive manufacture that I don’t have much experience with, but who does offer data recovery insurance on their products as a standard offering. The company is ioSafe http://www.iosafe.com/ and they specialize in manufacturing disaster proof external hard drives. Protecting your data is what their products are all about and guaranteeing them with a warranty to cover up to a $1000 of data recovery services should make you take them seriously.
I also remember working at ActionFront Data Recovery Labs in the early 2000s and we provided the recovery services to support a data recovery warranty for Belkin surge suppressors. Basically if you lost your data as a result of their product failing to protect your hard drive they would pay for the cost of recovering your data. There were no limits as I recall and the plan was based on our best efforts. We didn’t get paid unless we were successful so the client really did get a 1st rate recovery attempt.
While any item can be insured for cash compensation should that item be destroyed or lost, there are some things that just can’t be replaced with cash and perhaps your data is one of them. There are no guarantees that your data can be recovered so do what you can to prevent a data disaster in the first place. Protecting your data isn’t expensive, it’s priceless! … David Foster