Secure Data Rescue
Reviews and Complaints

On October 14, 202, I paid $299 and sent out my thumb drive for data recovery service that was supposed to be completed within 15 days SDR Order # 3268331. For some months the status showed as in-progress with 70% of the process completed. A year after Oct 2022 all I am getting is an error message with no status. So it has been more than a year and I have not received either my data or my money back. This is surely a SCAM. They give you no customer service number where to call.

9-26-2021 I sent my hard drive to SDR following there shipping info.
10-25-2021 SDR sent me an invoice for 375.00$ for repairs and I paid it,
for the first two weeks there was a little communication, then nothing!
it's now mid-January,
I have asked SDR to send the hard drive back to me, in whatever shape, and still no word. nothing,
how do we start a class action lawsuit against SDR?

My hard drive was sent to them the end of September. They started communicating very well. They let me know they had received my hard drive, they informed me the recovery process has began, they told me the process was almost completed and looked successful. All of a sudden after they had got my money before the process was complete they stopped responding. It's been 2 months I've been calling, leaving voice messages and sending emails they just will not respond. I want my hard drive. I've contacted my credit card to dispute the charge.

So far, I have given them $600. They have had my drive since May and no results. They seldom respond to my emails for updates.

On Aug 9, 2021 11:18 AM, barbara brundage wrote:
What is going on with my drive?
On 07/29/2021 1:05 PM barbara brundage wrote:
Can I have progress report on my project?
On 07/19/2021 3:57 PM barbara brundage wrote:
any progress on my drive?
On 06/25/2021 11:03 AM Secure Data Rescue Support wrote:

Hi Barbara,

We have done a head replacement, but haven't yet been able to get access to the drive.

We are reprogramming the drive firmware to try to gain access to the drive, it's a complicated process, hopefully we will have an update in a few days.

Thank you.

On Sept 7 I sent a hard drive to them for their claimed $199 recovery service which was advertised to take 10 days.

On Sept 14 they informed me that they needed to repair the drive which would cost an addidional $144 before they could attempt recovery. In spite of this sounding fishy I agreed on the next day and waited for them to complete the job.

On Sept 18 I was informed that the "repairs" were completed and that they would start recovery in around 4 days.

On Sept 25 they allegedly started recovery and on the 27th they informed me

"Our data recovery technicians have successfully completed the recovery process!

The successfully recovered files have been uploaded to a brand new replacement drive and you'll receive a confirmation email after the replacement drive has been shipped back to you.

Note here that they claim to have successfully completed the recovery process... THIS on 27 Sept.

Later that day they send:

"This email confirms that we've packaged your shipment and it is currently in transit back to you.

You'll be receiving notifications from FedEx as the shipment moves through the process….”

So shipped on 27 Sept. According to the page they link me to on their emails the item was shipped FedEX 2nd Day...

I requested a tracking number on several occasions, including using the "Live Chat" they claim to provide but is never online. The promised response within 24 hours never happened in response to several email and "live chat" (offline) requests.

On October 3 I had enough, considering in delay on the part of FedEx I still had not received my drive. Only after threatening to challenge the credit card transaction do the reply with a sea story:

"Good morning.

During the post-recovery process one of the checks we have failed, which was that there was just 750MB of data recovered and the drives filesystem reported holding more, indicating the extraction process failed. This typically happens when a drive is reformatted near failure ( IE you mentioned in your original note how the computer stopped recognizing the drive. If at some point the computer said the drive needed to be initialized/formatted to work with it and that was clicked, it's normally something like that which creates this issue ).

We put the drive back in queue to re-complete the extraction process, which was started again yesterday morning.

I'm sorry this part wasn't communicated earlier, the person who was doing the post-recovery didn't remember going as far as marking the drive as shipped.

I see in one of your below messages that by the end of yesterday you were protesting the charge. Please let us know if this was the case as it would save some time from us re-marking the drive as shipped and intercepting it to have it returned once the credit card dispute posted. If you haven't, the recovery will hopefully complete shortly, and we can offer to overnight the package to make up for some of the issues, as the $199 package you selected doesn't utilize 2 day service, but rather Ground, which based on your zip code is 2-3 business days. Only our $699/$999 expedited packages offer FedEx Express shipping."

SO, the "recovery" was not completed but my card was charged. The recovery was not completed but the drive was shipped, but it wasn't shipped and sat somewhere from Sept 27 through Oct 3.

Their only concern is the chargeback... Awesome Customer Service... NOT. An outright lie concerning shipping as they stated "as the $199 package you selected doesn't utilize 2 day service, but rather Ground, ..." while the page clearly shows Second Day Shipping.

When I challenged their lies they responded :

I've done my best to organize your response below to answer your questions:

Our days are business days as best outlined in the following FAQ : https://www.securedatarescue.com/#what-does-turnaround-time-mean .

On 25 Sep, fully one week later you got around to starting the recovery process. I’m not sure what “starting” means
^-- Starting means exactly that. The repairs were complete, and we started the process of imaging the drive to ultimately extract the data to a new drive.

Two days to recover data? Seems fishy to me,
^-- I'm sorry that it seems "fishy". The issue with the drive is that it failed mechanically, our repairs do not store it back to new condition, but rather just give us access to the data. The unhealthiest parts of the drive, where at the time of failure you had one mechanical part ( a head ) rubbing directly against another ( a platter, which is where the data is stored ) when they shouldn't. This creates permanent damage that can't be undone. The solution to this is to at certain parts of the imaging process slow the spin of the drive down. This reduces the speed of which data is transferred, but ultimately yields more data. If you think of it as an uneven surface, if the drive was spinning at it's full speed the heads ( the items that read the data from the platter which is where the data is stored ) would skip off of the top of the highest points and missing a lot of data. This way, the drive is spinning significantly slower than the speed it normally would, but the head is constantly pressed as close to the platter as possible, which is ensuring the most amount of data is recovery.

How exactly did you ship my package on that date when according to what you FINALLY tell me the “process failed”.
^-- As outlined in the previous email, we didn't ship the package. This is why you never received an update from FedEx because it was never picked up for the reasons outlined in the previous response. The recovery process didn't fail, just the extraction, again for the reasons outlined. Primarily because someone formatted the drive prior to sending it to us.

Why did you not respond to NUMEROUS requests for tracking information which to almost anyone else on the planet would be a Red Flag that something is wrong at your end?
^--We are dealing with a radically larger than normal volume of orders and ultimately customer support requests due to 3 recent hurricanes. We're working through the requests as quickly as we can.

Now you tell me that you placed the drive back in queue so you can do what you were supposedly doing a full week ago but are now suddenly, only after I threaten to challenge the charge and take money from you. I’m not buying the story, it’s too fishy for me and I hate being lied to especially when I’m paying for it.
^-- Our response was not due to an action of threat of a credit card dispute otherwise we would have responded before the deadline you set, we simply have a period of time in which we're dealing a very large burst of volume, and were not able to turnaround your query faster than 24 hours until the first response this morning.

TODAY you will keep me notified via telephone as noted in the terms of service YOU provided. My phone number is [protected].
^-- As you outlined yourself in your response, we do not provide telephone support.

My expectation is simple… TODAY you will complete the service I paid for. TODAY you will ship the recovered data and my original drive Fedex Next Day at YOUR EXPENSE.
^-- I'm not sure why there is such an emphasis/demand on something we already offered in regards to the next day service. In regards to the demand about completing everything today, we can not 100% guarantee that the process would complete today for the reasons outlined above in regards to speed of imaging. If it was a matter of simply making any of our jobs going faster, we would complete them all within a day, but unfortunately there are limitations the hardware itself provides at every step.

Given the above, it's clear you've lost our trust and I think it's best at this point to fully refund you for the process and destroy any/all data we've recovered, and overnight you the drive back so that you can complete the recovery process with someone else. I've gone ahead and started the refund process, and notified the technician working on your case to stop so that we can get the drive back out to you as quickly as possible..

In their FAQ they state:

" The less you try and use the drive the more likely we will be able to recover data from it. Think of it like a hole in your shirt. The more you keep picking at it the bigger the hole gets. If you think of the issue as a hole and each time you try and turn it on to get data from it as the picking, that's essentially what's happening. The more you try and recover it, the harder and potentially impossible it may be for us to extract the data off of the hard drive."

Note this was on 4 October... note also this statement..., "...and overnight you the drive back so that you can complete the recovery process with someone else."

As 9 October MY property they stated would be returned OVERNIGHT is not in my possession.

The have wasted a month of my time, likely damaged beyond recovery any data that was on the drive and have NOT kept their promise to return it to me.

BEWARE! Secure Data Rescue Fraudulent and Incompetent

I had a PC hard-drive crash so I found Secure Data Rescue's website which guaranteed recovery or no charge, flat rate $199, no hidden fees.
And a 10 day turnaround.
So, I sent my hard drive to them on August 10, 2017: I specified twice that I only wanted certain files - all others had been recovered, basically I only wanted: QuickBooks, Quicken, e-Mail - twice I explicitly wrote that, gave them file types to search for and so on. On August 17th I was e-mailed "my data was recoverable" but it would be an additional cost for parts, my new total was $383.55 - there is a very small asterick next to the "Flat fee" claim which if you dig long enough you find out buried in the website that parts are extra. Given they wrote me my specific files wanted were recoverable, I paid them.

Yesterday, Sept 5th - I received the old drive and a new portable drive back - NONE of the files I specifically requested are on there, the few files that are on there are corrupt and unreadable, so I did NOT get my specifically requested data back and want a refund.

But - despite no asterisks, no disclaimers, nothing but the words "100"% guarantee" - I am NOW told because I got some corrupted and other data files back (the ones I explicitly told them not to return) the guarantee is null and void.

So, there is no refund, there is no money back guarantee, and there is no real goal of addressing with my dissatisfaction. So to recap:

1) It was NOT $199 flat fee.
2) It was NOT done in 10 Days.
3) The No Data / No Charge Claim is not valid.
4) They do not really "love" happy customers.

These guys are really skirting the law by the narrowest of margins and being unscrupulous, unethical, and dishonest about what they advertise – AVOID THESE SCAMMERS AT ALL COSTS!

Avoid secure data rescue. There are many other companies that will do the same work with more integrity and speed. Secure data took 10 days to assess my hard drive, then took 10 more days to supposedly fix it. Secure data then charged almost $200 more for parts. A parts list was never provided. So much for "no hidden fees". When I questioned the charges, I felt threatened concerning the safeguard of my data. I reported this immediately to chase bank and visa. It was so serious, that chase visa recommended I call my local police department so that they could get involved. Apparently, any data that is recovered by secure data may be kept on file by secure data. When I challenged the charges, I received harassing phone calls from secure data. I filed a complaint with my local police department and federal authorities because of the sensitivity of the information on my drive. These agencies followed up by contacting secure data about the threats. There appears to be nothing "secure" about this business. There is nothing secure about the "data". The "recovery" was suspect and incomplete. There is nothing safe about "secure data recovery". Avoid secure data rescue.