DriveSavers is known for some of the incredible data recovery work they’ve done with extremely challenging cases. They have a vast network of resellers, mostly computer repair and IT support companies who refer data recovery work to them. DriveSavers is one of the oldest data recovery companies in existence today.
"Some of our iPhone customers will be away from home, they won't bring a laptop (for backing up their information) and they'll use their iPhones to take pictures, add new contacts, take notes on the phone, put things on the calendar - and if the phone gets damaged physically on the way back, that's when they lose their data and come to us," Christopher said.DriveSavers was founded in 1985 by Scott Gaidano and Jay Hagan. It's a good idea to do a computer backup of what's on the phone before leaving home, especially if you're opting not to bring a computer with you. Vacations and business trips seem to be the times when the technology gods taunt smartphone users. Rubin has had one customer who dropped a smartphone into the Amazon River, and many others whose devices were damaged from shower steam.
And if it's salt water, that makes it even worse because it's more corrosive." "That's because of the corrosion that can build up inside the device itself, which starts breaking down all the electronic components. "Water damage is probably harder to deal with than, say, physical damage to the phone," he said. "We have the capability to reverse engineer the memory module on the smartphone, basically take it apart, take out the memory module and reverse engineer the data structure" and extract the owner's personal information. "Now we are capable of recovering data from the actual memory chip on the phone itself," Rubin said.
#DRIVESAVERS COST IPHONE PORTABLE#
There have been enough customers with dropped or damaged smartphones that Rubin's company has gone from only working on phones that have a portable memory chip known as a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card or that have an external memory card to those that do not have removable memory chips. Rubin said his company's services start at "about $250," and can go up to $1,700 "and in some extreme cases can be more." "Economy" service, which takes longer than two days, costs between $500 and $1,400. The reality is, folks who are lucky to get everything back are more likely to pay the middle to the high end of the price quote."ĭriveSavers charges between $600 to $1,900 for one- to two-day service to "recover an iPhone of any capacity, whether it's an 8-GB model or the new 32-GB iPhone 3GS," said Christopher.
We might have been able to get back only a few critical files vs. "Typically, lower-end quotes mean that for us, the recovery of the data wasn't as successful as it could have been. "All of our (price) quotes are based on our success in recovering data," said Christopher.
#DRIVESAVERS COST IPHONE PROFESSIONAL#
It can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to more than $1,500 to have a professional take apart a smartphone and attempt to recover the information. And data recovery firms - which deal with everything from damaged computer hard drives to camera memory cards, are standing by, ready to take your call - if you can make one, that is. "More than 50 percent of the phones we see are water damaged," said Tal Rubin, CEO of .Īs smartphones like the iPhone and others increase in popularity, so does the risk of losing the data that users are constantly adding to these pocketable mini-computers. The domestic drama is unusual, but other potentially smartphone-destroying situations - devices dropped in toilets (yes, toilets), on sidewalks, in puddles and pools - are not.