The Joys of Thumbdrive Recovery

[HaQue]

I was going to ask, what is that, 12 gauge? (jk) BTW, what do you use for magnification to work on these? I just got my microscope last week and find that 20x is a bit too much; 10x would have been better. I might still order WF5X eyepieces to yield 10X when combined with the 2X objective. Got a 0.3MP USB camera with it but damn thing doesn't work. Pictures of these repairs would be good for your web site, or not, depending on how it looks. :mrgreen:

Hi Larry, My microscope has 2x and 4x objective. eyepieces are WF10X/20. I find 4x perfect for all USB traces, TSOP .5 pitch repairs and monoliths. 2x is perfect for slightly bigger stuff, I like to solder SX card pins under microscope for example as they are bigger, but the gap between contacts is tiny, and bridging 2 contacts is easy.

I bought some different eyepieces (cant remember which, I think 15X..) just to see if any would be better, but wasn't.. IIRC was a smaller amount of subject I could see.. planning to get all different ones available.

anyway, sorry for hijacking the thread!!!

 

[Jared]

I charged $400 for this one. Which is close to $500 CAD. But the fact is I don't really want to be doing a lot of thumb drives. So I quote high on purpose, to weed out the people who aren't really serious about getting their data back.

Personally I'd rather just work on hard drives.

 

[HaQue]

holy cow, I charged AU$70 to solder wires to broken Micro-usb WD Portable and copy all data to a new drive.. hmm, maybe I ARENT going to become a Millionaire doing DR after all

 

[LarrySabo]

@HaQue: thanks for the info. I don't know why they don't ship WF5X + WF20X eyepieces (which would give 10X, 20X, 40X and 80X magnification) instead of WF10X + WF20X (which give 20X, 40X and 80X).

@jared: Thanks for that info. I guess my $125 CAD is a reasonable minimum price. Funny how most users think, "But I can buy a new drive for just $10-$15!"

 

[HaQue]

I say, bargain! but does it come with your DATA on it as well??

 

[Jared]

Yeah, it is funny how people equate the price of the media and the cost of recovery. Like there is any relationship between the two. You sometimes have to explain to them that they aren't paying the cost of a mass produced Chinese product now, they are paying for someone in a developed nation to reverse engineer that product, make it work again, and extract the data.

As far as price is concerned, this is why it's important to differentiate yourself from the computer repair shops. Some people want to go to a PC repair shop and pay $70 for a quick repair, other people feel their data is too important for that and will opt to pay $400 for a data recovery company to do it. The difference is they know the data recovery company has more experience given that this is all they do verses the repair shops that dabble in everything but may not have experience with that type of case and end up experimenting on their drive. All comes down to comfort level. No one will take you seriously in data recovery unless it's all that you do.

 

[HaQue]

true.
One interesting thing I have found giving out my cards is that a lot of PC repair shops are really happy to pass the recoveries on to me. I don't know if they live in a bubble of their work and don't realise they can outsource quite easily or they don't know much about DR or what, but I am getting very positive results. maybe they haven't had the option dropped in their laps and just assume it is up to them. (not talking about the cowboys of course!)

 

[irs]

about this :

One interesting thing I have found giving out my cards is that a lot of PC repair shops are really happy to pass the recoveries on to me

i have to say that we work mostly through resellers, computers shops and IT distributors, we have also few end users but are about 10%.

i think is quite better to have loyal customers collecting jobs for you, and managing the end users directly.