IT Data Recovery — Attraction in Austin

If you are needing a hard drive/HDD recovered, Tom/IT Data Recovery is the place to go.

On Saturday 01/07, my 4TB WD HDD with 8 years' worth of videos and photos wonked out. Most importantly, I had almost 1TB of honeymoon photos and videos that hadn't been backed up. I googled "hard drive recovery Austin," which led me to Tom at IT Data Recovery! After reading his (well-deserved) glowing reviews on Yelp & Google, I reached out to Tom around 11:45PM via Yelp to provide full details of the situation. To my amazement, Tom responded back at 12:15AM and let me know to call in the morning. I was grateful for Tom's speedy and accommodating response since Google showed that his business is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

On Sunday 01/08, Tom & I spoke on the phone. He was honest and upfront with the pricing, provided realistic expectations of what ITDR can do, gave us the go-ahead to drop off the HDD at his office, and provided detailed guidance on how to find the office. I also had a lot of questions that Tom was more than patient enough to answer! The drop-off took no more than 10 minutes. Tom asked us which folders in the HDD were a priority (in case it crashed mid-cloning). For me - it was the Honeymoon and Hawaii folders; everything else was second priority. Throughout the following week, Tom provided progress updates via phone & e-mail. As an anxious person, it was reassuring that he was super communicative! Tom also shared with us a recovery agreement to sign via e-mail.

On Monday 01/16, Tom let us know that he was able to recover perfect copies of the Hawaii & Honeymoon videos and 99.9%+ of the sectors after the repairs and multi-pass cloning.

On Wednesday 01/18 (10 days after drop-off), we picked up our recovered data. Tom placed them in a 5TB portable USB drive that was compatible for both Mac and PC. Tom reminded us to make copies of the backup and let us know that ITDR has the data backed up for 30 days in case something went wrong after pick up (e.g., if it was dropped or mishap with the transfer process). If you are uncomfortable with that, you can also let him know via e-mail to wipe the data earlier. Payment was quick and easy, and Tom sent us a receipt via e-mail afterwards.

Overall, everything from beginning to end was super professional and efficient. I highly...

Got a SSD drive as a gift so I started using it to save work on a project. (Figuring SSDs were super safe...no moving parts!) Well, some mystery liquid got spilled on it (you could see the remnants of the stain ring on top of the drive.) And so there goes 200 hours worth of work down the toilet...

Checked around and started reading reviews about Tom and IT Data Recovery. What I like about this service is that Tom doesn't get paid unless they can recover the data (or at least a large portion of it.) I would have expected some sort of 'Eval Fee' to pay for his time to at lest open up the drive and diagnose the problem. But not here!

Beforehand, Tom will tell you a 'best case scenario' price. Then as he opens up the drive and sees the damage, will (if necessary) give an increased 'best case' price considering the parts and labor to fix the problem. If that price is not worth the data that's stored on the drive, you can say No Thanks! and walk away.

For me, I had the 200 hours worth of work, but then also realized I had moved some pics and movies off my home computer onto the SSD (again thinking it was 'safe'.) So the price made sense for me and Tom was able to get 100% of the data back. (Tom even included a picture of the damaged chips.)

One last thing about the experience - When Tom called to say the SSD was ready, we ended up talking about 20 minutes about data storage. He gave his pros/cons about Hard Drives, SSDs, Cloud Services. Explained how they work, the differences, vendor preferences, etc. It was very enlightening and helpful. Tom could've just been short with me, but he took the time to 'talk shop'.

So if you have a drive that got some liquid damage inside, let Tom at least look at it. All...

12JUL2023. In the morning of 6JUL2023 I dropped off at IT Data Recovery, 1700 S Lamar Blvd #338-A5, Austin, TX, the corrupted hard drive from my 2017 water-damaged dead laptop. Another unrelated computer-repair shop was only able to recover my user files from before 2018; this shop pulled out and gave me the corrupted hard drive. Tom Hall with IT Data Recovery called me that afternoon and said his preliminary inspection of the corrupted hard drive looked good for recovering all or nearly all of my user files. Tom said it would cost $300 for recovery plus $63 for a 1-Tb external hard drive for storing my recovered files. I gave Tom the go ahead for recovering all he could. Later that day Tom emailed me and attached a Jpeg picture showing some recovered folders dated from 2018 to 2023. Tom also called me and I told Tom this looked good. Tom was careful to not open a folder until I gave the OK. In the morning of 7JUL2023 Tom and I met at his office. Tom showed me my folders in a file-management program. We opened a couple of folders and I saw files that looked good and that, days later, proved to be good. I am very relieved and pleased that Tom came to the rescue. Tom was professional and a good communicator through out this ordeal. He got to work promptly on my problem; I don't know if he is usually this prompt or if I just got lucky. Starting now I will use the 1-Tb external hard drive I got from Tom for backing up my user files in order to avoid a...