I'm curious to hear how other people first got into doing data recovery work as a profession. So let me start with my story, and then perhaps you'd like to share yours.
About 7 or 8 years ago I was working as an electrician for a company that also did quite a bit of networking and IT work for some of our larger clients. My wife at the time worked doing bookkeeping for her father's multimillion dollar construction company. When the occasion arose, I'd help out fixing a computer or two to help things run smoothly (mostly to help my wife out). Unfortunately backing up his computers wasn't high on his priority list, and pretty much never got done.
One day his main office bookkeeping computer wouldn't boot. I stopped in to see if I could remedy the situation, and discovered that the hard drive was having some issues. I was able to get the computer back up and running on a new drive pretty quickly but when we went looking for a backup of his Quickbooks file, and other current contract documents they were about a year out of date.
It took me about a week to figure out how to get the data back. The drive had bad sectors in the filesystem and would today be a simple recovery for me, but I had to learn how to get a good clone and then recover the files from it from scratch (having no data recovery experience). GetDataBack became my friend that day.
Later on I happened to talk with my boss about the recovery and shortly after he had a couple other data recovery incidents come up from some customers and friends he knew, so I handled most of those as well. Mostly just logical stuff and a few PCB replacements. Then I had the bright idea to start up a side business recovering data.
Early on I made the mistake that a lot of people do, and I bought Salvation Data tools :roll: and I became quickly frustrated when they never seemed to work and raised more questions than provided answers in this work. However determined to continue on i purchased PC-3000 from Ace Labs, enlisted some help (mostly from Luke from Recovery Force) to learn how to use the tool and it's been my main business now (not just a side business) for almost 2 years. My wife has since left her father's company and is my bookkeeper and office manager.
So what's your story?
About 7 or 8 years ago I was working as an electrician for a company that also did quite a bit of networking and IT work for some of our larger clients. My wife at the time worked doing bookkeeping for her father's multimillion dollar construction company. When the occasion arose, I'd help out fixing a computer or two to help things run smoothly (mostly to help my wife out). Unfortunately backing up his computers wasn't high on his priority list, and pretty much never got done.
One day his main office bookkeeping computer wouldn't boot. I stopped in to see if I could remedy the situation, and discovered that the hard drive was having some issues. I was able to get the computer back up and running on a new drive pretty quickly but when we went looking for a backup of his Quickbooks file, and other current contract documents they were about a year out of date.
It took me about a week to figure out how to get the data back. The drive had bad sectors in the filesystem and would today be a simple recovery for me, but I had to learn how to get a good clone and then recover the files from it from scratch (having no data recovery experience). GetDataBack became my friend that day.
Later on I happened to talk with my boss about the recovery and shortly after he had a couple other data recovery incidents come up from some customers and friends he knew, so I handled most of those as well. Mostly just logical stuff and a few PCB replacements. Then I had the bright idea to start up a side business recovering data.
Early on I made the mistake that a lot of people do, and I bought Salvation Data tools :roll: and I became quickly frustrated when they never seemed to work and raised more questions than provided answers in this work. However determined to continue on i purchased PC-3000 from Ace Labs, enlisted some help (mostly from Luke from Recovery Force) to learn how to use the tool and it's been my main business now (not just a side business) for almost 2 years. My wife has since left her father's company and is my bookkeeper and office manager.
So what's your story?
I'm certainly not a DR professional, just trying to augment the income from my small PC repair business and cope with declining PC prices. Because my customers are residential and SOHO PC users, I come across many who need data recovery but can't afford or are not willing to pay the prices most professional DR labs around here charge. At first it was just logical recoveries and the occasional BSY/CAP fix or TVS diode repair. To expand the recovery business, I needed tools, training, and experience at an affordable, incremental cost. At my age, there was no way I was going to make a major investment and risk financial ruin by specializing in DR, especially when there were already three local professional DR labs. My age also meant I did not have the time and mental acuity required to address the complex needs of large organizations, e.g., complex RAID arrays, SAS drives, servers, business-critical databases and proprietary business software, etc.
