My storage hard drive is dead. A new external USB drive enclosure killed it - it blew the logic circuit board on the drive. I've lost all my music and a lot more besides... The irony is I was swapping the drive into a new enclosure with a fan from an old one without a fan so that I could put a back up hard drive in the fanless enclosure to back the storage drive up! Gutted!
Has anyone ever used any of the many data recovery companies that exist? I'm tempted, but I fear something that they might say could be cheap (cheapest I've seen is £97) would turn into a massive bill once they have your hard drive and are doing the job.
I've researched it and been quoted THOUSANDS (of $). One company I talked to said they work a lot with artists who lose irreplaceable stuff, not email and squirrel-on-surfboard videos.
I sincerely *love* Disco 2 and listen to it straight through regularly.
What worries me is that when you do the 'quote' on various websites all that happens is you get an e-mail telling you they can't quote and that you need to send the drive in. Fortunately, most of them seem to have a look at what needs doing for free, so it looks like I've nothing to lose other than a few quid on postage. I still get the feeling £97 could turn into £197 / £297 / £397 etc...
The ones here in the USA I called (this was a few years ago, mind you) all charged significant and non-refundable "analysis" fees. After this, they let you know what the real price will be.
I sincerely *love* Disco 2 and listen to it straight through regularly.
I've copied everything I had on my iPod back onto my computer, and am currently going through the extremely tedious task of putting it back in order on my new storage drive (the tracks don't come back off an iPod in the order they went on!) but there was a lot of stuff on my broken hard drive that wasn't on my iPod.
Try using a program called MP3Tag to rebuild the folder structure (say Artist\Album\Track) based on the tag data. Its does lots of stuff like this for free. Works brilliantly.
I remember when my old hard drive failed, recovered most of it but lost some rare stuff including the Really documentary and some other rarities due to the corruption.
