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Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
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Data loss is an amazingly stressful situation - businesses lose serious money and even go out of business because of lost data. One of my clients recently got in the position of needing data recovery services (important lesson - use your backup system!) and wasn’t comfortable sending the drive to Ontrack’s california office. So upon looking we found ADR was a national company with a Seattle data recovery office.
Upon verifying with ADR that they could recovery a Reiser filesystem and service would be done locally, my client brought the drive in. The local recovery tech attempted recovery and without notifying the client they sent it to their main lab in California. More than a week went by and they claimed the drive was “difficult” and data recovery was possibly unrecoverable, the client demanded the drive back.
This time I got to take the drive to Ontrack. What I didn’t know was for functioning drives Ontrack has Remote Data Recovery (RDR) where they can recover a drive over the internet! What ADR said may be unrecoverable, Ontrack had done in TWO DAYS!
In my experience Ontrack is the right choice for data recovery of Reiser drives.
Note: post updated 10/1/08 to correct erroneous information about ADR’s facilities per their request.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
August 24th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Wow, sorry to hear you had such an ordeal with ADR. At my company we use CBL data recovery (http://www.cbltech.com) and have no problems. Haven’t tried Ontrack. JT
September 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Try ReWave next time. You’re right, ADR does have dropoff locations. ReWave is one of the most honest companies I’ve dealt with and they don’t screw around with you on the price.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I wonder what ADR and Ontrack said was wrong with the drive. No doubt they were different assessments. Regardless, your client probably paid to much if it was done remotely (Meaning there was nothing physically wrong with the drive). There are a number of commercially available programs (R-Studio, GetDataBack, Ontrack EasyRecovery, etc.) that recover logically damaged hard drives for a fraction of what recovery companies charge. My company has had luck with ESS Data Recovery, but if it is a logical problem (Format, Deletion, Virus) we recover the data ourselves. It saves us both time and money.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I agree in house data recovery makes sense and is a good value for logical issues on common filesystems. One detail I forgot to mention is this was a ReiserFS system. No one I know had ever recovered a ReiserFS drive, ReiserFSCK failed, and the apps available weren’t promising.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Kevin,
ADR’s locations are not drop off points. ADR does recoveries at all of it’s locations including Seattle, but at the time of this post we were still in the process of setting up our Seattle lab. However if the drive needs extensive clean room work the drive will be shipped to our clean room. We also offer Remote Data Recovery just like Ontrack but I will say that the Data Recovery industry has not perfected the recovery of ReiserFS filing systems. Kuddos to Ontrack as they have created their own system for recovering data from ReiserFS filing systems. Some of the things that you have stated on this post are untrue and make it sound like ADR does not know what they are doing and that we are dishonest in our industry. The fact is that we hav accounts and perform recoveries for the larges companies in the world and are one of the only companies that can do this in most major cities in the US.
ADR is demanding that you take this post down as it is un true and devastating to our buisness. We will be forced to take legal action if this is not taken care of ASAP.