Seagate Recovery Services

We bought a 5TB hard drive back in October and immediately transferred all of our photos, videos, etc. on to it. After we heard about others’ horror stories about losing their data, we purchased Seagate’s Rescue Plan to help protect our data should the hard drive fail. Fast forward 2 months and the hard drive failed. We contacted Seagate’s Rescue Plan to file a claim and was told that because we hadn’t had the Rescue Plan for 60 days we couldn’t file a claim AND our issue was now considered a PRE-​EXISTING CONDITION! Oh, but good news, we can get our money back for the Rescue Plan. NEVER EVER BUYING SEAGATE AGAIN!

Long story short, I received my new hard drive with my recovered data (most of it, some of my personal videos were missing) there is a new folder called «other found data» which is basically thousands of video files about 3 seconds long (segments of data I used to have) and thousands of files that wont open due to an unrecognized file extension.
The real kicker, I also have someone else’s data on my drive, the phone rep said «that’s impossible» however there it is plain as day. So much for safeguarding your privacy, I wonder if my missing files are on this other persons drive??? boy will she be surprised! and pissed I have most of her field work and research papers. I will never own a Seagate product or use any of their services again. (FYI I had to send the new drive back to them so they can look into it, so I’m also out a replacement drive!!!)

I know there are some bad reviews on here… but in my case, Seagate Recovery Services really came through for us.
We recently bought a big NAS to save all of my wife’s business files (2TB of Raw Photo Files) because the drive the archive currently lived on was getting old. I THOUGHT I had backed up everything to the new server, but apparently did NOT. Turns out we were missing about a year-​and-​a-​half of data when the original drive stopped working.
We followed the online instructions, by putting in our information, the size of the drive and the serial number. For $ 45 they would examine the drive, and if it could be recovered, and additional $ 545 would be charged at that time. At first I thought it sounded like a huge sum… but figuring that they include a) postage from you to their lab, b) return postage back and c) a brand-​new usb external drive of the same capacity with your recovered data on it… That’s at least $ 150 of value right there. A local lab in Irvine, CA quoted me $ 1300 to «look» at the drive. True, they would probably have turned it around in a couple of days. but I didn’t have that much lol. The process took about a month… from shipping it off, to getting it back… but for the convenience, and the fact that they were able to recover each and every last bit of data back for us made it worth the wait.
Ours was a Seagate Drive that went bad, but they recover from other devices as well. In our case, it was the drive’s «motor» that siezed… clearly something that I would not have been able to fix myself.
THANK YOU Seagate for getting our data back. All ready to go with a new backup strategy… but if it ever happens again, I know who I’m calling. 8-)

This is place is totally ridiculous. Between them and Staples, who sent my laptop there, they took over TWO MONTHS to get my laptop back. And then I found out, he recovered everything that I already had on my laptop when I sent it to them which means THEY RECOVERED NOTHING.
I should’ve sent it to drive savers in the first place but I thought staples would send it to a reputable company!
Now I’m waiting to send it to drive savers when I get it back tomorrow.

Totally crap. My drive was not recovered. Instead, I got 1000s of folders back. Total mess. DONT USE SEAGATE DATA RECOVERY SERVICES
Amazing that Seagate Corporation allows this business unit to exist. Fire everyone.

Seagate Data Recovery is horrible. From the phone and email process to the «lab» center to communication from the sales rep to the data recovery. They are so awful, it would be funny if I wasn’t losing data due to their dishonesty and incompetence. My Western Digital external hard drive (with 4 years of personal photos) developed the «click of death», but was still spinning up (no grinding). The sales guy Josh (in Canada) that was handling my case was misleading («if your drive is just clicking, but is still spinning and not grinding, we should be able to get your data». «We can handle any hard drive brand, it is no problem.» and the kicker «Nothing we do will make your drive any worse than it already is.»). Into the process, I would find that Josh was very slow to communicate via phone or email. After three weeks of no news, I called to several times over a week and followed up with emails just to get nothing in return. I finally got one of the other people in the Canada office to leave a note on his desk to please call me with an update. Meanwhile, I am thoroughly freaked because my hard drive has 4 years worth of work on it and they have not communicated anything. Oh and the Santa Clara lab, there is no sign to indicate where it is on the street, you just have to drive around and ask people. You get to the front door and it is locked. There was never anyone at the desk, so knocking on the door does no good. You think they must be closed. You wonder if they have gone out of business because the place looked kind of empty and their are no signs anywhere and the little paper on the door that says «Seagate» looks very temporary. You call the Seagate 800 number and get some laughing guy in India who says that you are at the correct address and he gives you the number to the lab (which can not be retrieved from the Seagate website, nor by calling 411 information… the phone number given by 411 for Santa Clara Seagate Recovery Systems is no longer in service and the address they give you does not match the address on Seagate’s website or the address given my Seagate’s laughing-​Indian-​call-​center-​guy. I call the number given by Seagate India and there is no human being that answers, not even a «welcome to Seagate Santa Clara» type of greeting. Rather, it goes directly to «please enter the extension of the party you would like to reach» and then silence. The piece of paper in the front window that says «Seagate» also says «receiving in the back». So, I think that may mean I need to take my drive to the back entrance. I drive to the back and ring the doorbell of a door that looks like it might go into the same office (no sign). Some guy opens the door and says, «Yeah?». I say, «Hi, I need to drop off my hard drive for data recovery.» He looks at me blankly and starts pulling stuff out of my box. «take it to the front», he grunts. I tell him I was just at the front, but there is no one there. He says to ring the doorbell. Doorbell? I go back to the front and find the doorbell (not obvious as it is over to the side and again no sign) and ring it. A couple minutes later, some lady comes out of the back office and unlocks the door. She takes the drives, but offers no reciept. I ask for one. Their *economy service* is supposed to take 2 – 4 weeks, but ended up taking 6 weeks for them to finally tell me that «the recovery was unsuccessful». When I called to get details of exactly what that meant, Josh said that they had a hard time finding parts and that they tried two sets of drive heads, but were unable to read the disk. Basically, they didn’t know what they were doing and they were taking shots in the dark (with my precious data!). Later, I found some reviews on the net saying that Seagate has poor support for non-​seagate drives. I called Drive Savers (I wish I had used them in the first place) and they said that they hear stories like this all the time and that they might still be able to get the data for me (no charge to analyze the drive). So, off I go to pick up the drive from Seagate. Josh also told me to bring my power cords with the drives to the lab (I provided my own backup drive for the recovered data), but the cords were not in the box when I picked up the drives. The lady at the desk tells me «Oh, they *never never* tell you to bring your cables». «Your cables would have been in the bucket with your drives!» «Bucket??», I say. I unwrapped my drive to see it was badly mangled, like… the receiving guy used my drive as a doorstop for a few weeks and then gave it to his mastiff to chew on for a while. And, it was rattling too! Oh joy! Now my drive is rattling (as in, loose parts are inside the drive sliding and banging around). I knew then that my data and any chance of recovery was gone… Drive Savers later confirmed the same. They said the platter (the actual hard disk) was *severely* damaged by a loose drive head. I am still mourning the loss of those pictures. Next time, I will call Drive Savers fir

It’s a somewhat convoluted story, but basically, my harddrive crashed, and I went through the phone support rigamarole with Seagate Recovery. I was led down a path that came up with a quote of $ 1800, pretty much the most expensive quote possible based on the guided questions they ask you (I verified with the online system).
It turned out that the crash wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been (corrupted blocks at the beginning of the disk rather than a hardware failure), and I should’ve only been charged $ 1400, but they wouldn’t credit me back any money. They said the quote «was firm». So I pretty much got screwed out of $ 400.
My suggestion, when answering the questions online, be as vague as possible, and don’t admit that the drive is as bad as it is. Some of the answer combinations led to a quotes of like $ 900, so better safe than sorry.
Pretty pissed that I got screwed out of $ 400, but after countless phone calls and emails, I just gave up.