Data Recovery in San Antonio

Data recovery is the one job where I have to be honest about the limits, because some companies won’t be. Here’s the truth: about 70% of what people bring me is fixable on a workbench. The other 30% needs a clean room and costs thousands. I’ll tell you which one you have, for free, before charging you a cent.

What I can usually recover

• Deleted files and photos: emptied the trash, formatted the wrong drive, kid wiped the SD card. If nothing has been written over them, the data is almost always still there.
• Drives that won’t mount but spin up normally: corrupted file systems, bad partition tables, that “drive needs to be initialized” pop-up
• Laptops that won’t boot but the drive itself is fine. I can pull the drive, get your files, then we can deal with the laptop separately
• Phones that won’t back up: usually it’s an iCloud or settings issue, not the phone
• Old computers you found in a closet and want to get one last set of photos off

What I can’t do (and where I’ll send you)

If your drive clicks, beeps, or doesn’t spin up at all, the read heads are probably gone. Recovering that requires a Class 100 clean room, which I don’t have. Nobody local does. The nearest real clean-room services are DriveSavers (California) and Gillware (Wisconsin). I’ll tell you which one is cheaper for your situation. Quotes typically start around $700–1,500.

I’d rather send you somewhere honest than charge you to fail.

Pricing

Free diagnosis. If I can recover your data, you pay one flat fee that I quote up front before I start. If I can’t, you don’t pay anything. I’ll also bring an external drive to copy your files onto if you don’t have one.

A note on prevention

Once I get your stuff back, the next thing I’ll do is help you set up a backup that runs automatically: a Time Machine drive for Macs, File History or a cloud backup for PCs. Takes 20 minutes and means you’ll never need to call me about this again. While I’m there I can also clean out anything sketchy on the machine, help with the home Wi-Fi, or take care of any other computer repair the machine needs.