Your computer breaks down mid-presentation. Your hard drive makes a weird ‘whirring’ sound. These situations can send a shiver down anyone’s spine. Luckily, data recovery is an option.
Your first thought may be: is data recovery possible? The answer is usually yes. The second thought is probably: how much will data recovery cost?
This article is a small guide on determining the cost of data recovery for your business … or even personal data! This will help you become more clear about what you can expect.
Estimate the Cost of Data Recovery
The businesses in data recovery are infamous for hiding prices. A capable business should have such information available. At least, you should be able to call a data engineer to clarify the average cost of data recovery. In the meantime, however, it’s nice to be armed with your own knowledge.
Here’s the thing: every data recovery case is different. The severity of the damage, the type of hard drive, or the type of computer. These are all factors that influence the data recovery cost.
Factors and Questions for Data Recovery
You may not determine the exact cost of data recovery yourself. But it’s useful to know which factor may increase the price. Here is a list:
- Hourly rate of service providers
- The necessity of replacement parts
- Quality assurance of work
- Logical issues (i.e. functioning)
- Mechanical issues (i.e., strange sounds)
- Malware issues
- External resources
If you are dealing with a severe condition, it will cost the engineers more hours to work on the issue. The hourly rate can then be used to estimate the cost of data recovery.
Moreover, if you request a fast data recovery, it could be that the cost per hour increases. Or be prepared for some engineers to tell you that speed is not possible. The data engineers are at the mercy of the harddrive.
You can also hire a consultant to help you estimate such costs. As an example, see IT consulting with Ascendant.
Types of Data Recovery
There are two types of pricing that you may find online:
- Flat rate recovery
- Per-gigabyte recovery
Firstly, you’ll find that there is no flat-rate cost of data recovery. This is due to two things. One, it’s impossible to examine the situation remotely. Two, there’s no one-size-fits-all pricing as we described above.
Secondly, per-gigabyte recovery sounds logical but it actually makes little sense. If a hard drive has 10 gigabytes of photos lost or 200 gigabytes of tv shows lost, it takes the same amount of engineering time to recover the data. So, services will not often offer this pricing structure.
Find the Perfect Data Recovery Service
When you choose a service for data recovery, you should keep three things in mind. It should be affordable, it should be technologically innovative, and it should be completely secure. If your service provider covers all three factors, then you can get your data back … and for a good price!
If you are interested in more articles for entrepreneurs, check out the rest of our blog.
