[X4U] Recovery or a dead external HD

[Ronald Steinke]

On Jun 26, 2009, at 5:11 AM, Murray E. Milligan wrote:

> I have an external HD from a 3rd party company. I used it for my  
> Time Machine backup. I have now lost it, due to a short circuit in  
> the wiring of the HD power connection.
>
> I hope the contents of the HD are intact.
>
> Does Apple or any other good service companies offer a service to  
> offload the data and then upload it to a new media suitable for my  
> new Time Capsule to capture?

It will be much more economical to try to do the work yourself. Going  
to a company like DriveSavers to have them recover your data will cost  
you more than you think. The average cost is between $2,000 and $5,000  
and then goes up depending on how much work the company has to do to  
get your drive to run and make it possible to read your data.

Instead, I would suggest getting a new external hard drive enclosure,  
putting the drive from your old external box into the new one, and  
connecting it to your Mac. If the data has not been corrupted or the  
drive controller fried, you should be able to view the contents of the  
drive and then save the data that you absolutely must keep.

You can put a lot of data onto flash-drives for temporary storage  
until you decide on a permanent location for it, or you could save the  
data to a CD if you have a burner installed in your Mac. The CD option  
would give you a semi-permanent copy of your data that could be used  
again and again if needed. I would consider the flash-drive option as  
only a temporary location and prepare a more suitable storage device  
as quickly as economically possible.