Comp Recovery

The skinny:

In the summer of 2012, my external hard drive was pushed off a coffee table and rendered unusable.  I was desperate to get the information back.  After researching companies, I decided to go with Comp Recovery here in Philadelphia because they were local and by all accounts, legit.

"Yes we do take walkins and we have a FREE evaluation with no obligation. Our prices are generally $495-$1495. We have a class 100 Clean Room, a 92% success rate and our policy is based on NO DATA NO CHARGE."


On August 27, 2012, my EHD (external hard drive) was picked up.

What followed was a hellish, stressful, expensive, fruitless experience.

140 (ish) emails, numerous phone messages, and 17 months later, January 10, 2014, I received this email:

"I apologize I could not get back to you earlier. After 12 years, the business will be closing. We have moved out of the office already. However we will still be available for few more months in order to complete some projects and close some cases including yours.  We have no fund availability at this moment but we hope to close your case by the end of February. Your total refund is $$ and the external drive you gave us. Donor drives are the responsibility of the customer. We already have a NO DATA NO CHARGE policy and cannot be responsible for a donor drive when the recovery is unsuccessful. If we receive the funds we are expecting sooner, We will make sure to submit a refund immediately. Thank you."

There are a couple of lessons to take away from this:

1. CLOUD.  If it's important, store it in the cloud.

2. LEVERAGE.  If you do decide to go through a recovery, make sure you pay AFTER the work is completed.
3. Let it go.  If you didn't have it on the cloud and you lose the material, let it go.  It is NOT worth the stress and terrible experience of recovery.  Your one small hard-drive is so non-important to a company that does data-recovery that you will never get the service and attention necessary to complete the recovery (and your recovery will constantly be pushed back in favor of larger projects).

4. Commitment.  If you do decide to pursue recovery, read the fine print. If they haven't heard from you in x-days, then they can take your money and never complete the recovery, so you best be on top of contacting them constantly. Contact via email (or both) so you have a paper-trail. Document everything.

5.  Perspective.  For me, this was a huge choice to spend, what is for me a lot of money, on recovery, but I really thought it was worth it.  If I had recovered the data (maybe even at this point), it may still have been worth it.  In the end, it is only money, but man! do I feel swindled and dragged through the mud.  I consider myself a fairly savy consumer, but unfortunately, I misjudged here (side note: I did have other people look at the correspondence & company, and they too were fooled).

Are they just terrible people?  Does the company not really exist?  Was it just a perfect storm of terrible timing & events?  Did they actually recover my data and sell some of the information?

I'll never know.  But I do know, I'll never attempt a recovery again.