We live in an age where information is at our fingertips. If we need to find something, a product or service, we either ask someone, or ask Google. It’s important to do your research when searching for a service provider online as things can go very wrong if you choose the wrong one. We have heard endless stories about terrible service from certain other recovery companies in Cape Town, which is why it’s so important to check customer feedback such as Google+ reviews, Facebook comments and gather as much information as you can before choosing a data recovery company to work with. Let’s go through one example where a client was led astray by a competitor. Luckily he was put in touch with us after the incident and we recovered all of his data for him.

This client lives along the east coast of South Africa in an area where there are no data recovery labs in close proximity. He tracked down one of our competitors online and shipped the drive to them in Cape Town. He was quoted a ridiculously high amount of money, with another few thousand Rand on top of that just to look at the drive sooner rather than later. He felt he had no choice but to give them the go ahead. Days and even weeks passed with hardly any feedback from them. After pressuring them, he eventually got an answer out of them that they had tried their best and the drive was not recoverable, despite them installing new components into the drive. He was then charged a further amount to ‘reassemble’ the drive. As we will find out later, the drive was never disassembled to begin with! Below you can see the silver sticker seal that was still intact when the drive arrived at our lab, proving that new parts were never even installed.

At some point soon after hearing the news that his hard drive was not recoverable, a friend of his suggested he contact us here at SouthBit Data Recovery. We arranged to collect the hard drive from the competitor, assessed and quoted on the job. On assessing the drive we found two very disturbing things. Firstly, the seal that would have been broken when attempting the recovery was still in tact, proving that no physical recovery attempt was even done. Secondly, the drive wasn’t disassembled, yet he was charged a reassembly fee. Despite this, we quoted the client (about half of what he had been quoted by the competitor) and had the job done in 2 working days, a complete 100% recovery. Being a photographer who had traveled to some amazing destinations and captured some brilliant shots, he was hugely relieved and impressed with our levels of service. Below you can see the full file listing of the client’s data in our data recovery environment.

If you browse through our Google+ reviews and reviews of the competitor in question, you will find a detailed explanation of the client’s experience from his perspective. It’s shocking to think that certain companies will take advantage of clients in such a manner. At the end of the day, be sure to make an educated decision as to which data recovery you choose to use. In Cape Town there is only one obvious choice when it comes to most qualified and capable data recovery lab to assist you with your data recovery needs.