Backup & Data Recovery

The part of a computer that holds your important data (pictures, videos, documents, etc.) is the hard drive, at Truro Computers the most common repair we do by far is replacing failed hard drives.

Most people we speak to don’t realise that this is inevitable, a hard drive is a mechanical box with moving parts and motors and all will ultimately wear out and fail. Only 90% of hard drives last three years, meaning 1 in 10 will fail in this time, and only 80% of hard drives will last four years, most scary of all, a staggering 5% of all hard drives, or 1 in 20, fail in the first year due to manufacturing defects or external influences such as drops and knocks.

A hard drive failure can be immediate but more usually is progressive, often with the computer getting progressively slower until it finally stops starting up, at this point we can often retrieve the data but it is not uncommon for the data to be unrecoverable at that point or for the drive to fail completely when trying to copy the data off.

At least once or twice a week we have the unfortunate task of telling someone that we can not recover their data onsite and the only option, if it is essential data, is to send the drive off for an expensive specialist recovery with our data recovery partners.

The vast majority of customers we see do not have any sort of backup, a backup is fairly simple to take, whether it is using Time Machine on a Mac, Windows Backup on Windows or simply copying your files to an external drive or the cloud, the costs involved compared to the costs of data recovery are low and most can be set up to happen automatically.

Truro Computers are often tasked with recovering data from external hard drives which have failed, where customers have copied data to them as a ‘backup’ but then deleted the originals off their computer, a backup is only a backup if it is a second copy, external hard drives fail just as often, or possibly more so than internal hard drives.

We have seen customers who have lost, or had to pay hundreds to recover, years of baby pictures and customers who have had to recover client files they are legally obligated to keep yet it’s so easy to avoid. If you don’t currently backup it’s something you should do without delay, if you need assistance please do get in touch, bear in mind, if you have anything at all on a computer that you don’t want to lose the computer it is on will ultimately fail and it could be tomorrow!

Data Recovery Services @ Truro Computer Services

If the worst has happened and you don’t have a backup we offer a full range of data recovery services, we have software and hardware onsite and can more often than not recover data from failed hard drives here relativity cheaply and quickly if we get them in time. If more advanced data recovery is required, needing clean rooms and specialist equipment, our data recovery partner Ontrack is the number one data recovery company in the world, they can recover data from the majority of failed hard drives with a higher success rate than most other companies.

If your drive needs to be sent away we will fully manage the repair from start to finish on your behalf and, as an authorised partner, can offer their services at a discounted capped rate from the recovery prices they normally charge to the general public.