Outsource Data RecoveryReviews of outsourcedatarecovery.com

PCB replacement service was good. However, I was upset about the payment demand for return shipping before I could get a status of the job. The eBay listing stated Free Shipping. It also stated that if no data was recovered there would be no charge. I paid up-front via eBay for the service to replace the PCB . I was then sent a shipping label to ship the drive. I initially expected to pay to ship the drive there and for the service. The free shipping I expected would be for them to return the drive after job was complete. I was called and asked to direct and pay for further recovery action and final disposition before I knew if the PCB replacement was successful.

Outsource recovered my data, no question about that. I had an SSD drive drop shipped to them to put the data on. Somehow, it was blank when I got it ... not even formatted. To their credit they found a spare HDD loaded it up and sent it to me. Several months later I realized that all the problems I had been experiencing were due to lame SATA power connecters coming from my main power supply. IMHO, they are fragile and poorly designed. While trying to perform a backup with the recovered data I ended up with several directories missing. I emailed them and asked whether I could access my recovered data on their FTP server. They told me: 1) data only retained on their server for 14 days ! ... and 2) that the price to take the data off the original drive would be about the same ... near $500.00 Ouch. I examined the original Seagate that I sent to them, which, I had to pay extra to have returned to me. My computer could see the drive but said it was not initialized. Kroll's Ontrack EasyRecovery software saw all the files on the drive. I balked at buying Kroll's software ($79.00) for one reason ... In fact I was only being allowed to use their software for one year ... another self serving 'license' scheme. I ended up trying version 7.0 of the TestDisk software developed by Christophe Grenier. It told me that my "Partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55. It corrected it and ... VOILA, my Seagate was instantly usable and all my files were there. I'm no expert on master boot records but it seems to me that Outsource could have returned by HDD to me with a valid, usable MBR instead of one missing an end mark. In hindsight the drive did not have any huge physical problems, just a corrupted file system .... probably from the intermittent SATA power connector. IMHO $500 is rather pricey just to correct that type of problem.

If there it is not a simple repair the charges get above $1,000. Overall the shipping and report time was very quick but with the commercial ad price of $60 you need to be ready for the real pricing.

Service was ok. Way to over priced but they did the job right. They need to explain the steps of the process with more details and give recommendations or options towards client repairs.

Took a LOOOOONG time to get hard drive recovered.

Pro: Outsource did recover my data. Cons: Took several days longer than date quoted for full recovery. Entire process took over a month. Cost was slightly more than 8 times HIGHER than the $60 advertised price for a flash drive repair. Communication during the process was nonexistent unless I initiated it. Problems downloading the recovered files electronically once the recovery was completed. But, I got the files back that I needed, so that's worth an "average" rating.

The customer service rep and support personnel I dealt with were excellent. They responded immediately and were very helpful. My iPod's hard drive first began to respond very slowly and then just stopped working altogether. My project was to recover only the music files. This company recovers files and labels them as "good", "maybe" or "bad" 98% of my recovered files were labeled "maybe" or "bad". Considering this was only an iPod and that the data had not been damaged in any way I would think that the successful recovery rate would have been greater. I would hesitate to give them a more complicated project involving an actual computer where the hard drive had been damaged by being dropped, water or fire. As the title of this review says, I would rate their customer service people as excellent but rate their technical service as poor.

I didn't like how expensive it was for recovery. I do however acknowledge that I couldn't do it myself. So i felt that i was not in a position to negotiate. During my time of evaluating if I wanted them to do the work they sent out a Memorial Day offer to save 20% which i was able to take advantage of. So we settled on a price and the work of recovery began. When the recovery was complete they sent an email for me to select how I wanted the data sent back to me. I didn't realize that this would happen. I would have liked to understand that the price of recovery did not include a way to get my data back to me. The last experience is that i still do not have my new drive. There was a mix up in shipping. I opened the box and a few days later got a message that i was shipped the wrong drive. I did not plug in the new drive and i hope the other client didn't open mine but I will never know!