Our Photo Data Recovery Services Can Save The Day!
I understand the importance of your photo catalog. Whether you are a professional photographer with client assets on a failed drive, or a parent with photos of your children on a computer that has decided to stop working, I can help get your data back, safe and sound.
Not everybody is a professional photographer, but that doesn’t mean the photos are some of the most important possessions we have. Photo recovery is one of our top 3 services and we help people get their important photos every day.
As a parent, I am especially aware of how important photos can be. Just the thought of losing them makes me check my backups to make sure everything is working as it should be. Don’t have a backup? Check out our backup systems section below!
Types Of Photo Recovery Projects
There are a couple ways to lose access to your photos. Sometimes drives just fail, are dropped, or erased. No matter the cause, we can help you through the process of photo data recovery.
Random Drive Failure
The most common way we see a drive fail is just over time. There are a lot of very fragile parts inside the drive, and those fragile parts are moving constantly during use. It is pretty surprising it all works so well normally when you consider it.
We have seen drives fail after 10 years of loyal service, and others within an hour of being opened. But generally speaking, the older a drive is, the more likely you are to have a drive fail.
Dropped Drive Recovery
Another super common issue is a drive is dropped (or falls) and stops working. The drop doesn’t have to be big. I have seen external drives just fall from a standing position onto their side and fail from that. I have also seen laptops shut hard enough to cause a shake that failed a drive.
For photo recovery, it is important to not test a drive for long periods or try to get data off the drive using software when it has been dropped. The issues the drive has can get worse or cause further damage to the drive. So I would recommend bringing it into a data recovery shop for them to open up with a cleanroom and take a look at what the issue is.
Erased Photo Recovery
If you have accidentally formatted your drive or accidentally erased files, you are not alone. This happens a lot. With photos, it seems to almost always be the husband who is the offender, and we understand the importance of having the recovery be successful!
The most important thing about deleted file recovery is to not use the drive at all after the data is accidentally erased. Unplug it from your computer and power it off, then store it until you can supply it to a data recovery company. Read more about deleted file recovery for photos.
iPhone And MacBook Pro Recovery
Sometimes we don’t have the time to move important photos and information from our phones to a backup drive as often as we would like. If your iPhone has failed and you need the data off it, we offer iPhone data recovery services as well!
The newer MacBook Pro’s from Apple have data chips built onto the logic board. This makes them very fast, but also very difficult to recover from. We do offer MacBook Pro data recovery as well, but only for computers that have stopped working. We are not able to recover deleted files from these newer MacBook Pro’s with the built in data chips.
Photo Data Recovery Pricing
We know how it feels to deal with confusing pricing, so we try our best to make our pricing easy to understand. Hard drive recovery terminology can be daunting, so please feel free to contact us with any questions. We are happy to discuss your particular case and explain which tier we believe the drive will end up requiring.
Backup systems for photos
What is better than getting the data back that you thought you had lost? Not having to get data recovery in the first place! Thanks to marketing and low failure percentages on young drives, a lot of people don’t even know that a drive can fail at any time.
I remember when I first started working in data recovery at a particularly busy recovery lab and I couldn’t believe how many drives needed to be recovered.
At least two copies of all data
The most important thing to remember is that all important data needs to be in two places at least. This means you can have your photos on your iPhone and on the computer, or two external drives, or the computer and an external drive, but you need all the important data in two places.
To be on the safe side, it is a good idea to have it in three places, with one of those places being outside the area where your other backup is. So, for instance, if you have your computer holding your important data, and an external hard drive connected to that computer, you should have a second backup drive that you keep at your office or a family members house or in a safety deposit box. That way if something happens to the location of your computer (think theft, fire, flood, etc), you still have a copy of your data.
Multiple backups is better than expensive backup
In the case of hard drives, it is better to have multiple backups on multiple cheap drives than to have only one very expensive drive as a backup. I recommend buying multiple cheap drives; so you have multiple copies of all important data.
Use software to automate the backups
With all the backup drives it can be easy to forget which ones are up to date and which ones are not. It is best to use software in this case to help keep everything up to date as smoothly as possible.
Mac Software
There are a lot of options for backup software on the Mac, but three very well-known titles are:
- Time Machine (built into every Mac since 2008)
- Carbon Copy Cloner
- SuperDuper!
Windows Software
I do not have as much experience with backing up PC’s, but I know of a few good backup software packages that include:
- Syncback Pro
- Crashplan
- Clonezilla