Data Recovery Case File · Business Recovery · The Replacement-Cost Calculation

Data you could collect again — at a price: a surveying firm's failed drive, and recovery as a line-item business decision

Most of this archive's stakes are irreplaceable — the wedding, the thesis, the decade of photographs. This enquiry brought the other kind, and reasoned about it with refreshing clarity. A road surveying company, collecting condition surveys for local-authority clients, had lost a portable drive holding "a substantial amount of client's data." Their normal remedy exists: re-survey the roads. But at this volume, they wrote, they were exploring "if the cost of data recovery (if possible) outweighs the cost for resurvey" — a 500GB laptop-class drive, NTFS, full of bespoke file types their in-house software generates, partially detected through a USB caddy. Data with a calculable replacement price is a genuine business decision, and this page shows how a recovery quote is built to let a business make it.

Pricing a decision, not just a job — and the bespoke-format question

Their comparison needs three numbers, and the recovery side supplies all of its own in writing before a penny is committed: a free assessment that converts "if possible" into a specific, evidenced answer; a fixed quote for the recovery actually required — one figure a finance decision can sit on, not an hourly meter; and no-recovery-no-fee, which does something quietly decisive to the business case: it caps the downside at zero, so the true comparison becomes fixed fee versus resurvey cost, with failure costing only the days it took to find out. Their bespoke formats raised the question every proprietary-data business asks, answered here for all of them: recovery operates beneath file formats — sectors, filesystems, and the files' own structures come back regardless of what software wrote them, extensions and all — and verification simply moves to where it belongs: their team, opening a sample set in the in-house software that speaks the format. The one thing exotic extensions change is nothing; the one thing that would — encryption — their drive didn't carry.

The recovery — and the arithmetic's answer

Assessment settled "if possible" on day one: the drive's heads were degraded — enumerating politely, failing the real reads, the classic partial-detection presentation — and the fixed figure went back for the comparison. Against crews, vehicles, traffic management and programme weeks of re-surveying, the maths reportedly took the company minutes; the go-ahead came same-day. Under laminar airflow a donor head-stack went in; the PC-3000 imaged the full drive to coverage in the high ninety-nines; and the NTFS volume mounted whole from the image — the survey estate intact in its in-house structure, folder hierarchy preserved because for professional data organisation is content. Their team verified a sample through their own software, confirmed the collection opened and parsed, and took delivery on new media — with client-confidentiality handling documented in the report, since local-authority data deserves its chain of custody in writing.

Outcome

The surveys recovered at a small fraction of the resurvey bill — and a framework this page leaves behind for every business holding failed storage and a theoretical replacement path. Price both sides honestly: replacement costs include crew time, programme delay and client patience, not just the invoice line; recovery costs are knowable in advance, fixed, and zero on failure. Get the free assessment before mobilising the replacement — it takes days and changes the decision more often than not. And then bank the meta-lesson their case carries at no extra charge: field data's journey from device to backed-up server is its most dangerous mile, and a firm that copies collection drives the evening they return converts this entire page into a non-event. The roads will still be there. The point is not having to visit them twice.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.