Data recovery in
Kelowna and Lake Country

How much does data recovery cost?

A typical data recovery is $120. It starts with a flat $40 assessment so I can see what is actually wrong with the drive. If you go ahead, that $40 comes off your bill, and most recoveries take about two hours: $120 all in. If you decide not to go ahead once you know what is involved, you pay the $40 and nothing more.

If a drive needs a clean room, I refer it out and do not mark it up.

That $120 covers the common cases, and the common cases are most of them: a drive pulled from a laptop that will not power on, a drive that has started throwing errors but still reads, files deleted by accident and caught early. Two hours on the bench is enough to image the drive and pull the data off.

The jobs that run longer are drives with widespread bad sectors, where the disk has to be read slowly and in repeated passes over the damaged regions. If yours looks like one of those, you hear that at the assessment along with what it will actually cost, and you decide then. Nothing goes over the quoted figure without you agreeing to it first.

What I will not do is give you a number before I have looked at the drive. Anyone quoting a firm data recovery price over the phone, sight unseen, is either guessing or padding.

What can be recovered from a failing hard drive?

A spinning hard drive rarely dies all at once. It develops bad sectors, and the parts of the disk that have not gone bad are usually still readable. That is why a drive can be unbootable and still full of intact photos: the operating system needs thousands of files in the right places to start up, whereas your holiday photos just need their own sectors to be alive.

The first thing I do is image the drive, meaning copy it sector by sector onto healthy storage, and then work from the copy. That matters because every extra hour a failing drive spends powered on is an hour it can get worse. Recovering from an image instead of the original means the drive only has to survive once.

Realistically, documents, photos, music and video come back most often, because they are self-contained files. Databases, mail stores and virtual machine disks are more fragile, because a single corrupted region can damage the whole container.

Mechanical failure is a matter of when, not if. Backblaze publishes failure rates across a fleet of hundreds of thousands of drives each quarter, and every model on the list fails at some rate. A drive that is several years old and has started clicking or slowing down is behaving normally for its age, which is exactly why the backup conversation comes after the recovery.

Source: Backblaze Drive Stats

What about a dead SSD?

Solid-state drives are a harder problem, and it is worth understanding why before you spend money. An SSD has no platters to read; the data lives in flash chips managed by a controller, and it is almost always the controller that fails. When it does, the chips may be perfectly intact and still completely unreachable, because nothing can translate their contents back into files.

The practical rule is that if the SSD is still detected by the computer at all, even intermittently, there is a real chance. If it does not appear in the BIOS and does not appear on another machine, the odds drop sharply and honest recovery usually means a specialist with chip-level equipment.

There is a second difference that catches people out. Modern SSDs use TRIM, which tells the drive to actively erase blocks once a file is deleted, rather than just forgetting where it was. On a hard drive, a deleted file often sits there recoverable for months. On a TRIM-enabled SSD it can be genuinely gone within minutes. If you have accidentally deleted something from an SSD, stopping immediately matters far more than it does on a hard drive.

Can you recover data from a laptop that will not turn on?

Very often, yes, and this is the most common data recovery job I see. A laptop that will not power on is usually a laptop problem, not a drive problem: a failed charging port, a dead battery, a blown board, a screen that has stopped displaying while the machine underneath runs fine.

In those cases the drive is untouched. I pull it, connect it to my bench, and copy your files off. That is a straightforward job, and it is often finished within the same day the machine arrives.

It also means you have a decision to make that is worth thinking about before you spend anything: sometimes the answer is to recover the data and not repair the laptop at all, particularly on an older machine. I will tell you what each option costs so you can weigh them, rather than quietly repairing a machine you were ready to replace.

The exception is a modern laptop where the storage is soldered directly to the mainboard, which is now common on thin ultrabooks and every Mac with Apple silicon. There is no drive to pull, so recovery means getting the board working again, and that changes both the cost and the odds.

How long does data recovery take?

The assessment is done the day you drop it off, same as every other job here. You get a phone call telling you what state the drive is in and what is realistically coming back.

The recovery itself depends almost entirely on the health of the drive. A healthy drive pulled from a dead laptop can be imaged and copied in a few hours. A failing drive with a lot of bad sectors has to be read slowly, sometimes in repeated passes over the damaged regions, and that can run for several days of largely unattended machine time.

I would rather take three days and get your files than rush a dying drive in one and lose the chance. If you are on a deadline, say so when you book and I will tell you honestly whether it is achievable.

When should you stop and unplug the drive?

Immediately, if you hear clicking, grinding or repeated spin-up-and-stop noises. Those are mechanical sounds, and every additional minute of power risks the heads doing further physical damage to the surface holding your files. Turn it off and leave it off.

Stop as well if you have just deleted something important, especially on an SSD, where TRIM can erase the blocks within minutes. Do not keep using the machine, do not install recovery software onto the same drive, and do not save anything new to it. Writing new data onto a drive you are trying to recover from is the single most common way people destroy their own files between the accident and the repair shop.

One more: if a drive has got wet, do not try to dry it out and power it on. Bring it in still wet. Corrosion under power does far more damage than water alone.

Repeatedly running consumer recovery tools on a physically failing drive is the other common mistake. Each scan is another few hours of stress on hardware that is already dying, and it can turn a recoverable drive into a lab job.

What data recovery cannot fix

A physically destroyed platter. If the read heads have crashed into the disk surface and scraped the magnetic coating away, the data in that region no longer exists in any form. No software and no lab recovers what is not there.

Properly encrypted data without the key. If a drive is BitLocker or FileVault encrypted and nobody has the recovery key, the contents stay unreadable even when the drive itself is perfectly healthy. This one genuinely upsets people, so it is worth checking now, while your computer still works, that you know where your recovery key is.

Most ransomware encryption. Where a working decryptor exists for a known strain I will use it, but for current strains there usually is not one, and anyone promising to break the encryption itself is not being straight with you. Recovery in those cases means restoring from a backup that predates the infection.

Overwritten files. Once new data has been written over the same sectors, the old contents are gone. This is why what you do in the first hour after a mistake matters more than anything I do afterwards.

And to be plain about my own limits: I do not have a clean room. Drives needing to be opened go to a specialist, and I will tell you that at the $40 assessment rather than charging you for a long shot.