Our Company Wins the PC3 2009 Supreme Brand Award
Source: PC3 Corporate 2009
Archived award report | Source shown on this page: PC3 Corporate, 2009. This page preserves the 2009 award report. Its seven-in-ten success figure, capacity-based pricing, offline work computers and separate hard disk for each customer describe arrangements at that time; they do not establish current data-handling procedures. The wording about destruction certificates is not a guarantee of the outcome of every current case.
Current data recovery service information.
Thoughts on winning the award
Benjamin Wong, the company’s General Manager, is delighted that “Vector Data Recovery” has won the Supreme Brand award for “Data Recovery Services”. Benjamin says Vector Data was not the first data recovery company in Hong Kong; it only started its Hong Kong business in 2005. Although there are not many competitors in Hong Kong – after all, not many people look for this type of service – competition is still fierce, so gaining customers’ recognition really matters, since their services involve some of their customers’ sensitive data. Winning the award also shows that customers have confidence in us.
Reasonable prices
When data recovery services are mentioned, many people’s first impression is that they are expensive, with every 1MB charged for, and that apart from large companies, not many people can really afford them. Benjamin says his company’s strength is its reasonable charges, with clearly marked, honest prices! Their charging system is based mainly on the capacity of the hard disk, depending on which price band the disk falls into – for example, how much is charged above 120GB and how much for 160GB – so that customers clearly understand the charges. In addition, they offer customers a free preliminary inspection before giving a quotation, and charge only if the data is successfully rescued, which gives customers extra confidence.
Even a broken hard disk can be rescued
Quite a few computer shops also offer data recovery services, but mostly simple data restoration, such as data loss caused by accidentally deleting files or formatting a hard disk. Benjamin says this kind of data restoration is relatively simple, but most customers face more complex problems – for example, the hard disk’s heads, motor, parts or circuit board have failed and the disk simply cannot work normally, so even recovery software offers no way of rescuing the data. If the problem lies in the hardware, they first inspect the hard disk and replace parts in a “clean room” in order to retrieve the data. As for the success rate, Benjamin says that data is usually rescued successfully in 70% of cases, and failures are mostly caused by scratched platters.
Respect for customer privacy
Vector’s staff are bound by contractual terms that prohibit them from taking data away, and each customer’s data is stored separately on its own hard disk to prevent mix-ups. In addition, all computers used for data rescue or inspection are completely standalone and are not connected to any network, to prevent data leaks. If required, they will also sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) with the customer to protect the customer’s privacy.
Data destruction service
Besides its data rescue services, Vector also offers a service that is the complete opposite of data rescue: data destruction. When some companies need to replace their hard disks, they often worry that the data on the old disks could be read by others. Vector provides degaussers that use a powerful magnetic field to erase the data completely, and afterwards even issues a certificate proving that the data on the hard disk has been completely erased and cannot be restored! Besides degaussers, Vector also has shredders that destroy data completely by physically destroying storage media such as optical discs, USB flash drives, memory cards and disks.
Future development
As hard disk capacities grow and the types of storage media multiply, Benjamin says they will keep improving their technology to handle data rescue for all kinds of storage media! For example, they recently succeeded in rescuing a RAID system made up of eight 2TB hard disks (16TB), which is far more complex than rescuing a single hard disk – showing that the complexity of hard disk data rescue today keeps increasing.
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