Many of us have a small collection of old or malfunctioned devices or hard drives which we don’t pass on or recycle because they still contain something we don’t want to lose. Whether I’m dismantling your elderly mostly-dead desktop computer in search of your images of your kids as toddlers, or simply retrieving the contents of a cranky drive, or a stack of old file-backup DVDs, I can retrieve your files for you**.
Document Files, photos, music, & videos can be saved from…
- Computer hard drives and SSDs (desktop, laptop), PCs, Macs, & Linux
- CDs
- DVDs
- 3.5″ floppy disks (if still functional)
- VHS tapes
- Collections of USB flash drives
- Cloud services
Your Files, Back in Your Hands
I can lifeboat your masses of files to a fresh external drive, or newly installed internal drive in your computer, or cloud service. Optionally, your files can be de-duplicated (potentially saving gigabytes of space) and given a full file index.
Privacy & Recycling Old Hardware
When you don’t want your old data to get into anyone else’s hands. I can render your old drives unreadable so they may be safely recycled. This can be done by doing a repetitive-write low-level format, or by physical destruction of the platter.
**Data retrieval – Some Sobering Truths
I’ve got skills but I ain’t lyin’. I won’t pretend I can deliver full-on miracles. Here are some notes:
- Certain levels of wear or aging will cause a drive to be entirely unreadable.
- Unlike a older windows user login+password, which is often easy to bypass, strong encryption on a drive with a lost password can be unbreakable
- Despite how they marketed to us 20 years ago (“Ur files will be safe foreveerrrrrrrr!”), storage CDs and DVDs have a finite lifespan, and most consumer-level writables are now far past end-of-life. There is hope, but it’s not a sure thing.
- Sometimes trying to run a death-clicking drive will hasten its death. (There are white-room professional options for death-click drives that I can point you towards, but they are costly.)
- Files that have been entirely overwritten by other files + your OS are not possible to retrieve. (If you lost a file, STOP using that drive while you’re trying to get it back)
Chat with me about your situation, and I’ll help get you the info you need to make a decision.