Hey everyone, I have a big problem, my external drive fell off my desk last night due to me cumbersomly tripping over the USB lead. Now it's clicking when I plug it in and windows vista and xp both don't recognize it at all anymore. I tried taking it out of the case and have put it into a tower but the BIOS just jams up when it tries to recognize it. After reading a lot of forums I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to send it to a data recovery company. I'm willing to pay as this drive has programming projects, a game development kit I was writing and worst of all, 15 songs for an album I've just spent 2 years writing along with around (I'm not exhaggerating) 7,000 tunes and demos I've written from the last 7 years I've accumulated aswell as the album art and website designs for my bands I've been working on. Now what I'm worrying about is that I have about 40gb of movies, music and ebooks I've downloaded aswell as programs, ALL from file sharing (so illegal) and some... *cough* photos of an ex girlfriend... I was wondering if I send this to a company and they recover the data and see the amount of stuff downloaded, do they have the right to call the police and turn me in? Or is it more dependent on the individual doing the recovering? Thanks in advance, I apologize for the inconcisely put thread but I wanted to tell everything. Thanks again.
Welcome to HWF When a company recovers your files, they aren't permitted to actually 'view' the contents, because it would break the right of privacy.
Thanks I'm happy to hear that, I need to get my music back but don't want law suits! I'll be hanging round this forum from now on methinks! Thanks again.
...ok that's kinda made me nervous... kind of... Being in the UK the companies claim that your information is protected by the data protection act. I'll have to do some more reading though...
Sorry, I didn't mean to make you nervous, I was just kidding. But, I would check before you send it in, just in case. You can never be to safe.
Yeh, I've found a company who in their terms and agreements state that your data is protected by the data protection act which should mean it'd stay between you and them what's on the disk I imagine. They're called dataclinic in case anyone comes across this thread who's in the same predicament. You didn't really make me nervous but still, it's best to be safe, don't wanna end up arrested for "demo-ing" software and music I can't afford. Thank again!
