OK, I knew this was going to happen... I've waited forever to use a backup service to store a backup of my photos/videos outside my home. I was just about ready to use Jungle Disk w/ Amazon's hosting service.

I've been copying my data between network drives to consolidate the data and get the drives ready to mirror. Then...my drive with most of my family vids died. Fortunately, it doesn't sound like a full hardware failure, the drive doesn't make noise. It's a LaCie enclosure that appears to use some type of h/w encryption, so it's not as simple as changing out enclosures, I already tried that with no success.

My next step is to use SpinRite to attempt a bit for bit recovery. I've had some extremely good success with that in the past. However, if that fails, I'm ready to pay the money to have the drive recovered. Does anyone here have a recovery service that they've used with success? I know there's a bunch from googling, but I'd prefer it if I had referral.

Thanks. Wish me luck...

drivesavers.com is the best in the business, but it will cost you. They're in Novato.

Thanks, good rec, somewhat local.

Gillware.com use my affiliate code #9516 and you will get free dvd's and return shipping. Free evaluation.

This topic came up at least once before here in the past. I have a tool that I've used (the name escapes me right now) that worked WONDERS for me in the past. It chugged and churned away at the drive for something like 2 days straight, and I got back all but just a couple of photos and a couple of other files. I recovered something like 20,000 photos and critical documents, and lost less than 10. I'll see if I can look on my desktop PC for the tool.

If that or SpinRite doesn't work, then you can send it off somewhere, but the last time I looked (which was about 2 years ago or so), it was a couple thousand dollars. Then again, I may not have been looking in the right places back then...

Thanks fellas.

I knew this'd be a good forum to ask.

I finally looked up that software. It is called Active Undelete.

I had great success with version 5 and they are now up to version 7.

Active Undelete Web Site

Thanks. I did an online quote. Wow, that's expensive. Seems most services start at $1K.

I ran SpinRite and it recognized 6 Linux partitions on the drive. The last partition was unrecognizable and thus unrepairable by SpinRite. That is the first time I've ever seen that.

I'm going to give a local tech a shot and see he can have some success.