Igor

United States

Summary: 2 months after I engaged with them I ended up with the mutilated hard drive, no useful data, rid of 250 GBP. Story: I had a 2.5' hard drive failure, got in touch with DTL. They tentatively diagnosed the problem as head failure and estimated the recovery to cost 195 pounds, head swap required. No data no charge they said. The moment they received the drive, they came back suggesting the data IS corrupted as well and the price went up to 450 for "not guaranteed, upfront payment" recovery and 750 for "guaranteed, no data no charge" and after a short negotiation offered "guaranteed" option for the same 450. Once I accepted, they went silent for a month, not responding to emails, with the status of "waiting for parts" - the head, apparently. Which makes it obvious that they couldn't have evaluated the state of the data on the disk in the first place: you can't read the disk if the head doesn't work. So that bump from the initial 195 to 750 was a purely opportunistic scam. Five weeks later they received the part, attempted and only recovered 10% of the data missing the mark on what I was looking for. On the basis of "no data no charge" I didn't owe them anything - but I didn't want to give up on that drive just yet and offered the initial 195 quid if they send it back with the head swapped, that was the cost of the swap they originally quoted. They offered to send me the recovered data for another 55 pounds and I paid that as a gesture of goodwill - they tried, I saw the folder structure. When I received the drive it was not operational. If they swapped the head, it wasn't working - and when I asked the question they claimed they never promised the drive will be operational. Yet, they accepted my offer to pay for the head swap knowing it's of no value to me, and used the opportunity to bump the price again. It's classic example of fraudsters' operation, steer clear if you cherish your data, your time or your money.