Hard Drive, SSD, USB and Deleted File Recovery for Ramsey, MN

Ramsey sits between the Mississippi on the south and the Rum River on the east. It stayed a rural township until it became a city in 1974, and it has grown to about 27,600 people since.

The 1892 brick schoolhouse that later served as the town hall still stands near Highway 47. If you've got scans of old township photos or family records on a drive, those are exactly the files worth backing up twice.

For us, the Mississippi is the only thing between Ramsey and our bench. Head east on Highway 10 into Anoka, cross the river on Highway 169, and you're in Champlin.

A summer thunderstorm rolls through, the lights flicker, and the next morning the desktop won't start or the external backup drive is completely dead, with no spin, no light, and maybe a faint burnt smell. Summer storms knock out more drives than people expect, especially computers plugged straight into the wall with no surge protection.

What a surge usually does to a drive

Most hard drives have small protection parts on their circuit board that sacrifice themselves to absorb a surge. When one of those blows, the drive looks dead, but the platters inside, where your data actually lives, are often untouched. That makes many surge cases very recoverable, as long as nobody makes it worse.

Please don't swap in a board from eBay

You'll find advice online to buy a matching circuit board and swap it in. On modern drives that rarely works, because each board carries calibration data unique to that exact drive. A mismatched board usually just won't work, and in the worst case it can make the drive behave in ways that damage it. Board-level repair and microsoldering are something we handle, and they're priced at our flat specialty rate.

Keep it from happening twice

Once your files are back, put the computer and any backup drive on a decent surge protector or, better, a small battery backup (UPS). And keep a second copy of anything important somewhere other than that one drive.

The evaluation costs nothing. After it, you get one flat price: $75 for most jobs, or $140 when the drive is unstable and needs slow, careful imaging. When the data can't be retrieved, the recovery itself costs you nothing.

Surge-damaged boards that need microsoldering, and drives 6TB or larger, are a flat $250. RAID and NAS boxes are priced per drive (see below). Those are rare, and if your device needs one of them, we'll tell you during the evaluation.