Choose your data recovery company wisely.

We've had umpteen phones this year for that have been to one particular unscrupulous data recovery company before us, but this one takes the biscuit. Email sent from them to the customer read:

"Your device was dismantled and the Nand chips were harvested in identical unit so that the chips off recovery could begin.

The engineers connected your handset to our Data Extractor via brass wires to attempt the imaging process but this was not successful. They then attempted a control read for each sector, then a deep freeze read which both failed. After attempting 3 additional methods, our last resorts, of a data recovery, a voltage override, an infrared read flow and thermal profiling with VCC compensation which also failed, it was then declared as a no recovery.

I am sorry that we were unable to retrieve your data but please be assured that our engineers exhausted all methods"

The chip was still caked in epoxy resin and flux and had clearly had no work done to it at all, aside from being removed from the board. Most of the jargon used meant nothing and was clearly designed to blind  the customer with science.

The customer was charged £400 for a couple of paragraphs... I should have been a writer instead.... 

If you choose the wrong data recovery company, you might as well throw your device, money and any chance of getting your data back on the nearest bonfire. So what should you look for? 

Make sure that they offer:

1. No recovery no fee. If you're paying a data recovery company, it should be for recovered data, not words or excuses, right?

2. Fixed prices. A common trick used by cowboy companies like the one mentioned above is to lure you in with 'too good to be true' prices, which turn out to be just that. They then inflate the cost, citing parts, donor devices and additional work required.

In many cases you only get one chance to recover data from a failed device,  choose  wisely, choose Phone Data Recovery.