"Quick turnaround, helpful staff"

Staff explained the problem in terms I could understand, and kept their word on competitive pricing and extremely fast turnaround. Hope I don't need their services anytime soon, but if I do, I'd go back without hesitation.

"Excellent Service"

Excellent service, good communication as to time line for recovery, good follow through on sending files back in correct format. Would recommend this company.

"Prompt and efficient"

I was very pleased with the prompt and efficient service received. My data was recovered quickly from my laptop which went thru a house fire. Instructions were clear and the responses to my emails were timely. I was able to get all my data back. Thank you

"Dead Drive Recover"

Proven did recover a lot of data and we are grateful to be close to 100%. Use the cloud and back up drives!! We had 2 drives in RAID and after we got our info back I think we may have lost some newer info since both drives experienced a type of failure. The price was four times the low estimate and almost double the high estimate. The timing went from 6-10 days to almost three weeks. If it came down to it I would probably use them again and now I know the price and timing can vary that much. All representatives were very polite and responded in a timely fashion.

"Great Services but took longer than anticipated"

After loosing files from a flash drive that were not backed up, Proven Data Recovery was able to restore 90% of my files for a reasonable price. While the service did take longer than anticipated (about 3 weeks from start to finish), they offered a discount to our original price agreement to compensate. Everyone I dealt with was very professional, understanding and committed to working with me. While I hope I never need their service again, I would go back if necessary.

"Great service!"

I really liked the service I received from Proven Data. I was able to drop off my damaged hard drive at a secure drop off location downtown (with an incredible view of Lake Michigan). Communication was free-flowing, I was able to call and email the office at any time (during business hours) and Steve or Mark would help me. Steve and Mark are both very friendly and easy to work with. I wish there had been more information given on my options as to what I can do with my data once its recovered. It was posed in such a way that I had to buy a new hard drive through them. However, I had an external hard drive handy so I asked if they would be able to put my recovered data on that and they said it wasn't a problem. They paid for me to ship my external and to ship both the external and the damaged hard drive back to me.
The cost of services was incredible compared to some other options out there! I was quoted at one place for $1300 minimum. Proven Data did a free estimate and charged me $412 for the complete recovery. It took a little longer than I would have liked, but there was a more expensive option to have it done in 3 business days. I'm broke so I opted for the 6-9 business day option.
I would recommend Proven Data to anyone. Very happy with my service!

"Efficient and Effective"

I was copying data from my laptop to my back-up external hard drive when suddenly my external drive became unresponsive. Needless to say, after I made several failed attempts to revive it, I was terrified. After all, my external drive literally backed-up my entire life for the previous 10 years. All photos, videos, files, etc., suddenly there were gone. I found Proven Data Recovery, optimistically told them my tale, was assured they'd do all they could to recover my missing data, but they were also careful to say that they couldn't promise anything. After sharing my tale of woe, their engineers accepted the case. And 24 hours later they recovered every single file...what a relief! They were professional, incredibly responsive to my myriad questions, and most importantly, did their jobs and found every last file I thought I'd lost forever. Now I can tell my wife I have all our wedding pictures and can tell my boss that yes, I do have those documents from 3 years ago. Phew!

"Positive and efficient experience."

I had an extremely positive experience with Proven Data Recovery Services of Hartford, CT. Although the extent of the work that was needed to perform the data recovery from my damaged hard drive was expensive (fortunately my insurance covered it as it was due to soot/smoke damage from a fire), the process concluded with a successful result. All of my data was recovered and no files were corrupt. My dealings initially with Mark Congionti, then with Steve Genez were professional and efficient. Both Steve and Mark were clear about the process and gave clear explanations to any questions I had about the process or their policies. I received email updates frequently as to the progress of the recovery. I made several phone calls to clarify questions I had and both Steve and Mark were timely in returning calls as needed. They took the time to be certain I understood the scope of the work and provided detailed diagnostic documentation for my insurance company. Quality company, I recommend them without reservation and would use their services again if need be--hopefully that will not be the case! Steve and Mark will not disappoint, unsurpassed customer satisfaction.

"Recovered data from failed multi-drive NAS"

I had a home-built network attached storage system (NAS) using FreeNAS. It had 6 Seagate hard drives that were mirrored using RAID 6, with about 5 TB of data used. My son, who is a professional photographer, relied on the NAS to store his photos from the past 3 years, assuming that with the redundancy of RAID, his photos were safe, even if a hard drive failed.

After several months of operation, one of the hard drives in the NAS did fail, and FreeNAS warned me that the system was degraded. I pulled the bad drive, and replaced it with a new one (and returned the defective unit for a refund under warranty). FreeNAS was in the middle of rebuilding the mirrored data on the replacement drive, when another drive on the original set died! That corrupted the entire storage volume, rendering ALL of the the data unaccessible, including my son's photo archive.

I sent my drive set to another data recovery service, and while they were confident that my data could be recovered, their prices were astronomical. I tried a 2nd data recovery service; they said they had succeeded in recovering my data, and then a day later, they recanted, saying that it got corrupted during the final recovery and transfer to new media.

Finally, I contacted Proven Data Recovery, and explained my situation, and the history of the NAS and the failure mode. They were up-front, and said that recovering the data from FreeNAS system that failed in the middle of a re-mirroring would be difficult, and could not guarantee that all the data would be recoverable. They also made it clear that while the individual files and folder/directory structure might be recoverable, the FreeNAS volume itself could not be re-built (I would have to set up a new NAS system, and copy into it the recovered files). I sent them my set of disks, and the price they quoted, while not inexpensive, was less than half that of the first service I contacted.

PDR kept me in the loop as to what they were doing to recover my data. As it turned out, the problem was that read/write heads on the (2nd) drive that failed had "crashed", and with my permission, the they transplanted the heads from one of the good drives, to allow the data to be read. Thereafter, they were able to recover almost all my files (only a few came back corrupted). However, from the time they said the files were recovered (and they gave me the names and dates of some of the files as evidence), it still took more than another month to get the data back to me. As they explained it to me, the delay was inherent, due to the limits of the operating system needed to read, convert (to Windows-readable format) and back-up the files from the original FreeNAS formatting. They did offer to let me and my son do a remote connection session, to transfer critical files that were already recovered, if needed, before the full recovery was completed.

In the end, I got all my disks back; 3 marked good, with my restored data on them, and the other 3 marked bad. PDR said they would keep my data backed up on their systems for 2 weeks, in case I had any problems transferring the recovered data.

As noted above, virtually all my files were recovered - 5 TB worth - , and in the right folder structure. This made it easy for me to organize and back-up the data onto a new NAS, using non-Seagate hard drives, as well as a cloud backup service. I have retired the original drives, and plan never to use them again.

Thank you Proven Data Recovery !!!

Lessons learned:
- Don't trust Seagate hard drives. (This is supported by 2014 data from BackBlaze, which found Seagate drives to have the lowest reliability, with annual failure rates as high as 12 %).

- If running a home NAS, better to create multiple (mirrored) volumes with pairs of disks, rather than a single volume with multiple disks. While this may be less efficient in terms of storage capacity, even if you lose a volume do to a double drive failure, you will only have to attempt recovery on a part of your data, rather than everything,

- Even with a RAID system, have an independent duplicate back-up options.

- If you do suffer a data loss disaster, go to Proven Data Recovery, but be realistic about how long its going to take to get your data back.

"These Guys are Superheroes!"

You never think it is going to happen to you. But when it does it’s devastating. Your heart stops, your stomach hits the floor, and you are totally paralyzed as to know what to do. Thank Goodness for Proven Data Recovery. When my faithful old lab computer blue-screened on me the other day, loosing valuable experimental research data that I was just about to backup (honest!), I was in complete disbelief and probably the most terrified I had been in many years. The data were critical to a really important research study our lab has been conducting. After struggling with these experiments for a long time I had finally got them to work and acquired the last data set needed for publication. In a panic I asked a computer whiz in the lab to take a look and he quickly discovered that my hard drive was a Raid 0, which is apparently one of the most difficult types of hard drives to recover data from. After a night with little sleep I searched the internet and came across Proven Data Recovery who are specialists in Raid technology. I knew that there could be a lot of bad companies out there but I noticed that they had recovered data for other researchers at my Research Institution and so I had a very good feeling about them. As soon as I called them and spoke to Mark, my dedicated case manager, I knew that my precious data was in the right hands. He was polite, professional and extremely knowledgeable. He organized a free evaluation of my hard drive and got back to me within a couple of days to tell me what the problem was. The damage was quite bad but he was confident that they could get the data back. Because of the type of damage and difficultly in recovering data from this sort of drive the price was more than we could afford. However, Mark knew how crucial the data were to us and how we rely on limited government research grants to fund our research and he pleaded my case to the company and got the cost within our budget. Not only that….he also got the team to work around the clock (on a weekend) to get me the data back ASAP. When he told me all this I almost cried. My fully recovered data was back with me in a flash and are now being analyzed and processed for publication. Thank you so much Proven Data Recovery for being my Superheroes and Thank You for supporting our research. This company should be the first choice of anyone who has a data recovery problem (big or small).