Why does nobody talk about how the $180 'data recovery' shop down the street just hands you back a wiped drive

Kim Reed · 2026-09-22T08:50:03.903051+00:00

Took a customer's laptop to a shop on 5th because she wanted photos off a drive that wouldn't boot, and they quoted her $180 flat. She got it back 4 days later with a fresh Windows install and a shrug, no photos, no backup image, nothing. Turns out the guy just ran a clean install after his clone failed to finish, and by then he'd already overwritten the sectors he needed. I pulled it on my bench with a $35 SATA dock and free software, got about 600 of her 900 pics back in an hour, mostly because I imaged first and never wrote to the original. So the lesson I keep telling people is image the disk before you touch anything, even if it's slow and the customer is breathing down your neck. Has anyone here found a decent shop in a smaller city that actually images first, or do you all just do recoveries yourself at this point?

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Why does nobody talk about how the $180 'data recovery' shop down the street just hands you back a wiped drive | Computer Technicians - Thought Shares