Efrem

For reasons that are neither here nor there, I have a Mac disk with some files that need to be recovered. They were not yet backed up, for reasons that are also neither here nor there. The problem began when a B-tree rebuild was interrupted by a cable being pulled out midway through. My local support guy confirms that the disk still has the right amount of data on it, so the files are almost certainly still intact, but his software-based access methods can't get at them. I know data recovery services ain't cheap, but in this case they're probably worth it.

Two services advertise in MacWorld, Drivesavers (drivesavers.com) and ESS Data Recovery Labs (datarecovery.com). My guru said he's had good experience with Ontrack Data Recovery (ontrackdatarecovery.com). All three have Web sites that are carefully designed to inspire confidence, of course. I know nothing more about any of them.

Does anyone here have any experience with any of those, or with any other Mac data recovery services that you can recommend?

boberonicus

Six months ago, after I got price quotes from the drive recovery companies you mentioned, I went the DIY route. It's faster, and might be worth a shot:

1. Buy a USB drive enclosure for your hard drive. They're about $15.
2. Put corrupt drive in case.
3. Hook corrupt USB drive to a healthy mac, using a USB cable.
4. Install and run Data Rescue II. The free version was fine for me, but you may need to pay. I think the free version only lets you get one file.

Alternatively, you might consider putting the damaged machine into Firewire target disk mode. My drive was so corrupted that this didn't work for me, but it's easier than the stuff above. Essentially, this turns the entire damaged machine into a hard drive enclosure. Then you connect up to it via Firewire (from a working machine) and see if you can read the drive.

nmenaker

I have actually had good luck in this situation, hooking the USB drive up to an ubuntu machine, and creating a bit for bit restore of the drive surface using ddrive. you have to have a second drive ready for a complete write and it takes a LONG A.. time. But, I got back 99% of what was missing.

Send away recovery is very $$, and I don't think any of the current online sites have an advantage over another. I would certainly never send it off myself, and have been able to recover data from even drives that had a hard time spinning. Orientation works, putting in the fridge works, holding in strange ways helps (get a vise or something for this). but running it all through a linux wash seems to work the best in my experience.

pdxer

what are his software based access methods?

drivesavers is among the best. none are cheap.

unless the drive has a physical failure, you should be able to run a recovery app and recover the data.

i'd first start with alsoft disk warrior. it is utterly amazing at repairing corrupted directories, although it may take a while depending on how bad it is. this is exactly the type of scenario for which it's designed. it works by analyzing the drive and rebuilding a brand new directory from scratch. nothing is written to the drive unless the user confirms that the replacement is correct (and it can even preview it without modifying the drive). very highly recommended. if you buy a box copy, you can boot off the dvd and let it do its magic. if you buy it on line, you will need to attach the corrupted drive to the mac you are using.

in the unlikely event that diskwarrior can't repair the directory, data rescue might be able to recover the files.

you might also consider getting a forensic usb/firewire bridge which blocks all writing to the drive, thereby guaranteeing that no further corruption can occur. it's not required but it can be useful.

Error 601

I second Disk Warrior - I just recovered my Macbook with it.

mbreuer

As the disk itself is presumably undamaged, it should be recoverable via the disk tools, no? Before spending money on a service, how about trying out your local apple store? They should be able to connect the drive to a working machine and see if the drive can be recovered (i.e., b-trees fixed). The disk tools disk (which you can also boot into) attempts to recover files via alternate paths and recreate the btree if need be.

pdxer

i don't know if the apple store will run recovery tools, but that could be an option if they do. the problem is you don't want to make things worse, and that's not that hard to do if someone uses the wrong tool or makes a mistake and writes to the drive. as for apple's disk utility, it can sometimes repair a drive, but it is not anywhere near as comprehensive as disk warrior.

jackal

I've heard nothing but positive things about Drivesavers since I first started using Macs in the early 1990s.

I recently asked them for a quote to recover data off of my dead 100GB internal drive (I had a backup, but in the process of copying files from my backup via the command line, I thought I had accidentaly deleted 25GB of pictures from my recent trip to Australia).

They have two options: a flat fee for JPG recovery and a prorated fee based on how much data they recover.

The prorated option would have cost between $700 and $1900 to recover data off of my drive, depending on how much of the drive's data they could recover. The flat-fee JPG file recovery was $950.

I ended up locating the files in a buried subfolder and not needing the services of Drivesavers, but I thought I'd post the prices here. I knew Drivesavers was expensive, but those prices shocked me.

I wish they had some lower-cost options that are based on actual time and materials labor. Some drive recoveries (such as the one in your case) are relatively easy--just hook it up to a machine, hit "start" on recovery software, and boom, you're done. Total technician time: 10 minutes, plus maybe an hour of unattended recovery time to rebuild your B-tree nodes. Others require hours and hours of technician time to physically disassemble the drive in a clean room and reconstruct it into working physical media and require the technician to babysit the recovery process and reconstruct the data--like this one. It seems now that those who have minor issues are forced to pay prices that assume the worst.

My favorite drive-recovery experience: my 1999 PowerMac G4 came with a 10GB Quantum Fireball CX. The drive truly lived up to its name, and the drive's logic board shorted out and one of the chips on top had a small mark of melting. Fortunately, the drive was under warranty (can't remember if the warranty was directly from Quantum or from Apple), so I had a replacement shipped to me (same model with minor improvements--the melting was a known issue of the CX series). Before I swapped drives, I took the new drive's logic board off, put it on my old drive, plugged that drive into my friend's computer, copied the data off, and then reassembled everything back to normal before sending the old drive off. Total time, including drive time over to my friend's house: an hour. Total cost: free. Drivesavers would have probably charged me a thousand bucks.

nmenaker

this thread just made me run all my backup processes out of schedule a second time. :-)

dlerner

If your data is really important, running any recovery software that writes to the damaged disk is a mistake. At Tekserve here in New York, our cardinal rule of data recovery is do no harm - so we always work on clones of the damaged drive, never the original. Even the best directory repair programs will occasionally do the wrong thing. Needless to say we don't ever boot the computer from the drive we're trying to recover either.

For clean room data recovery (hardware problems), we've had great experiences with both Ontrack and Drivesavers, but yes they are pricey.

mbreuer

Yup - and if the drive is functional, best plan is to pull it, enable write protect and then make a clone of the whole thing. Personally, this is a great use for Linux as you can clone the whole drive to a file on a sufficiently large drive and then mount the partitions via a loopback device. You can even mount them in VMs running Windows if need be, or access them via native Mac tools over a network connection. If you create the files using LVM you can also snapshot to back out changes that don't work.

Efrem

Update: Ontrack has the drive. (My local tech support folks had tried all the other things that were suggested.)

If that fails, I tried the StellarPhoenix data recovery program on an older backup that was also "destroyed" as part of the original problem. It found most of the data, just not the latest versions. You can download the scanning software for free, it tells you what it can recover, and if you want to recover it, buy the recovery part for $100. If Ontrack can't get the current data, I'll do this to get the older stuff. Better than nothing.

Will post an update when I hear back from Ontrack.

jimmyread

I had such an experience what you have mentioned in your post. Couple of months ago, when I tried to import some multi-media files to my Mac Leopard Operating System, data loss occurred. I imported some mucic and presentations from my iPhone to my system using the iTunes for the backup.

After when the data transfer was done, when I opened my computer and was shocked to find that the backup file was not in the memory of the system. I checked for the data on my iPhone and there also there was no data. Actually due to some bugs in the system, all my files got deleted when the backup took place.

I tried accessing the data manually but I failed in the endeavor. I then used a software called Data Recovery Mac which restored all my multi media files that got deleted. Not only this, I repaired some of the damaged files bearing HFS file system using this software. You can have a look at this software, hope you recover your deleted data.

Danni Wells

Yeah Efrem!!! Stellar Phoenix Mac Recovery Software is an awesome application.I used the latest version V4.0 which is compatible with snow leopard as well.This is an easy-to-use Mac Recovery application that works in all data loss situations.

Efrem

Update: OnTrack couldn't do anything. Stellar Phoenix did the job. I lost about a week's worth of updates, but other than having to ask my students to bring in their midterms so I could re-record those grades, nothing important. My photos lost their metadata but I still have the images, which is what matters most.

The only problem is e-mail. Apparently Apple changed its Mail program to use a new .emlx file format but neglected to update it so it would import .emlx files. This is a known problem. Several people have posted solutions online, but so far none of the ones I've tried have worked. (The emlx to mbox converter shareware program just hangs when I try it, on both G4 and Intel laptops running OS 10.4.11.) Any ideas in that department would be gratefully appreciated.