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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/AntarcticNightingale on 2024-01-23 03:28:17+00:00.
I have a really old internal HDD from a 15ish year-old laptop that can still be powered on, so the drive itself is most likely okay. However, due to it having no backups, I want to proceed with extreme caution (since there was a recent heartbreaking drive tragedy).
So I do not want to take any chances and would like to send it to a data recovery company to get its data out in a safe environment (most likely 300dollardatarecovery). But since the drive is not actively failing (besides being ancient), how do these companies determine if its old read/write head is going to last through the entire initial imaging process? The worst possible case is the head looks good upon inspection and fails in the middle of being imaged.
I looked up DeepSpar and it says that it can "process every head differently, depending on the level of degradation." but how does DeepSpar know that?
If there are other ways to make sure the head lasts besides what DeepSpar uses, please let me know. I'm very curious how this process works.
Thanks so much!