It's reliably terrible: the portable hard disk with your only copy on it is the one that will fall from the edge of the table. Regardless whether you hear a click or a beep, see a blink, or it simply does nothing at all, we can help to recover lost files for Swansea from portable and desktop USB drives made by any manufacturer, so think of us as the back-up disk's back-up plan.
A complimentary diagnostic for all our jobs using an external hard drive. You get one fixed quote in writing prior to any work being done on your data.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
All external hard drive jobs begin with matching the symptom(s) to a fault on the drive. These 15 will cover virtually all issues sent to the bench.
The classic portable drive kill: heads crash into platter surface (or surfaces), and each attempt to use it increases the risk of destroying another one.
Firmware or bridge logic or other electronic failure has left the good, working disk "invisible." It is active, but unable to communicate.
Unplugged or yanked cable while writing leaves the table bad; the file(s) underneath the error will be okay.
If your drive has stuck heads or is putting too much strain on its motor then disconnect it and stop using it immediately.
In the event that your drive's electronics have died or its bridge unit has failed, we will image through, or work around, the original circuit board.
Passport and Elements boards are part of the encryption system for your external drive, thus if you swap the enclosure on your drive, it will display as unreadable (noise) instead of your stored data.
Desktop external drives fail along with their mains bricks: often the most inexpensive component on the menu and sometimes the hardest to fix.
Bad sector spreading slows down all your file transfers; we use a hardware imaging tool as opposed to letting the damage spread.
The format and deletion of external storage devices can be recovered well if they are shut down or "parked" as soon as possible.
Storage platters can withstand much more abuse than most people realise and can be treated using tools found in a lab and then installed into another unit.
After receiving a knock Seagate's small portable STEA/STKM will click. Donor heads for these units are stocked.
LaCie's Ruggeds (STFR) store in camera bags until one day they get knocked around a little too much: orange bumper & standard recovery.
Over time Toshiba Canvio micro-B connectors tend to lose their connections due to repeated plug/unplug cycles: either resoldered or simply bypassed so the drive can still be imaged.
The T5s, T7s and SanDisk Extreme SSDs all die electronically with no warning: they are flash-bench cases in the clothing of a drive.
For years unplugging a write mid-way through will cause corruption to build up in the catalogue of the drive (cumulative) that eventually causes it to be unable to mount as an available volume; we rebuild the volume from a full image of it.
Portable units are frequently carried around; they're crushed, yanked out in the middle of a write cycle and placed at the edge of a desk. A portable unit that has been dropped while the disk is spinning will normally land heads-first, which creates the "classic" post-drop click. The My Passport and Elements units made by Western Digital (WD), the Expansion and One Touch units by Seagate, the Canvio units by Toshiba, the Rugged units by LaCie and the MiniStation units by Buffalo: all visit this bench every day, where recovery of an external HDD is the main event rather than a sideline. Inside the plastic is a hard drive. Everything we can do in our drive lab is applicable to the hard drive inside your portable unit.
Many modern portable drives (WD above all) use the USB interface bridge board to encrypt data by default. When shucked and connected via SATA cable to the motherboard, the first thing that will be seen is a mass of noise on disk, instead of files, and that is where countless DIY attempts stop in a panic. This behaviour is typical and something we deal with routinely. We run the recoveries either using the original bridge circuitry or recreating the cipher chains used at time of failure, so when completed your exact file/folder structure from before will be restored.
A portable drive enclosure, or external, is nothing but an entire hard drive enclosed in a jacket. The whole drive bench applies and we also get the additional use of a bridge kit:
Translator repair, defect remapping, and unlocking of service area locks using firmware level access to manufacturer service mode, on the industry-standard bench.
Imaging unstable drives requires the ability to capture data head by head using current monitoring, adaptive timeouts and retry logic that can't be replicated in software-based imaging solutions.
A bench used to open drives (the heads and platters are only touched at this workbench).
Custom made combs, lifts and alignment fixtures enable safe movement of a head assembly and entire platter pack into place in another chassis without the heads ever physically contacting the platters.
Stocked, indexable inventory of donor drives covering models, firmware families and site codes, thus eliminating the need to order matching head stacks or boards.
WD self encrypting portables and other SED enclosures are imaged via their original bridge, or decrypted around it.
We have an inventory of matched replacement bridge boards which will allow us to continue the encryption chain on your drive when we replace your existing bridge board.
By volume alone, the WDBYVG-generation Passports and STEA Expansions above are the most-recovered devices in the building, with portable SSDs like the T7 gaining on them fast. WD's hardware encryption lives on the USB bridge, so a board that has failed needs its cipher chain preserved rather than a swap of the caddy; Seagate's slim portables click after they have been knocked; and the mains-powered desktops routinely outlast their own power bricks.
Years after Iomega disappeared from the marketplace, their eGo, Home Media, and GDHDU-series external drives continue to turn up with old family archives locked inside them, but now there is no manufacturer available to contact. The interior mechanism of these units is simply a standard mechanism (with the discontinued Iomega name tag attached), so an image and recovery will be made exactly like it would have been for any portable drive of that time period.
A LaCie generates income as it moves (STFR-series Ruggeds are moved from camera bag to bag, d2 models sit at the bottom of many editing desks, Porsche Design drive models hang on studio shelves) but it is the movement itself that kills it; a Rugged dropped with force mid-rotate will damage the head(s), while the desktop lines' loss of their Thunderbolt or USB-C bridge electronics happens much more frequently than the failure of the actual disk they support. The LaCie name was absorbed into Seagate several years back so there isn't an OEM factory-based repair option available anymore, thus dead LaCies have to go through a lab such as this one. Photographers and video editors throughout the Swansea Bay area send us enough volume to provide us with a steady flow of items to open up, image the bare disk (fitting donor heads if necessary due to a "drop"), then send back the project recovered from that image.
The My Passport should be treated like a single self contained unit versus a drive with a case (caddy): the USB port is physically mounted to the drive's own board and since it uses the same silicon as the encryption it will prevent you from accessing your files if either of those systems fail. If you move it into another case yourself, all you get is static instead of a folder structure. There are donor boards for both the WDBYVG and WDBPKJ generations held here, and what separates an 'undetected' Passport from one that can be read is being able to carry over the cipher chain without interruption. In contrast to the above described failures, the mains powered My Books have two other types of failures: dead power bricks and burnt out bridges. These typically occur in the rest of the unit, with a perfectly working hard drive still attached.
MiniStation portable units (HD-PCFs especially) have all the same "classic" issues with 2.5-inch drives that you'd expect: drops, loose micro-USB connectors, increasing number of bad sectors. The desktop DriveStation units fail in different ways, but for the most part they tend to blow up their own power supply and/or interface board first, instead of the storage portion. Some MiniStations do have hardware encryption as well; once you've given us the correct password to decrypt the encrypted data layer during recovery, then it's simply files that are returned back, not just noise. Regardless of which unit comes, this is the exact same process: pull the housing away, create a full-sector image, then standard disk recovery after that.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.