Look for "clean glove box" or similar on Google.
You could probably make one yourself for less.
http//
http//
http//
http//
Scott Moulton offers instructions on building your own glove-box on his web site,
As of the time of this writing, though, his web site returns a "Service Unavailable" message. Keep trying.
14 Aug 2009 The site's back up. Here's the link to an affordable DIY glove-box
http//
DaveR - I was looking at a fixed £50 to look at the drive and a sliding scale on top, getting cheaper per GB the more that is recovered. I've been researching pricing near me, and most places offer a 'no fix no fee' policy, so I'll have to do the same.
Maybe in these situations I could offer advice on data backup as part of the deal?
jhup - That's a good question… why would anyone give their drive to me? I'm only going to advertise locally, I'm not looking to become a national company. As I'll be serving the local area I hope I can offer a personal service. I'll go to the clients address with my laptop and assess the drive before bringing it back for recovery. People like a face/person to talk to, rather than some faceless company with a helpline.
$250 for a 160GB drive is about $1.50 a GB.
I have some more prices from competitors. One is offering a £30 examination plus £80 per 100GB. So that £830 for a 1TB drive. A couple of places charge per hour (£30-£40) which I would find difficult to invoice for. How would you prove you worked for 3 days restoring a drive?
Mark
lll
That's good to know. I'll drop you a PM.
My job involves imaging drives and analysing with EnCase/FTK to recover deleted/lost data. I just figured I could do this at weekends in my own time and make a bit of extra cash.
I have to be careful about 'conflicts of interest', but apart from that, so long as I do everything legally and above-board, I don't see a problem. So long as the tax man get paid!
Does anyone know what a single license cost is for EnCase and FTK? We use them at work, but we have enterprise deals. I see X-Ways is around £650 per license.
Many thanks,
Mark
If price is a consideration, why use EnCase or FTK, both of which are expensive if you are trying to keep costs low?
Think of it this way, if you are doing data recovery and not true forensics, then your problem is either going to be logical (corruption of the file system data, deletion, etc.) or physical (disk hardware failure). For the latter, EnCase and FTK are going to be useless. For the former, you can recreate filesystems with a hex editor (if you know what you are doing) or TestDisk and you can carve out files from unallocated space using a data carving tool such as PhotoRec.
Based upon what you say that you want to do, you can build a pretty sophisticated data recovery shop using open source tools. In fact, I almost never use EnCase or FTK for pure data recovery tasks, especially if I need quick turnaround.
seanmcl - That's what I'm aiming for… data recovery. I don't think I want to get into the hardware side of it, especially if it means taking the hard disc apart to fix. With these I would probably refer them to a specialist.
The software I have now is open-source. I have Grab and Autopsy to image and strip files out, and I can use khexedit to try to fix file system problems. I have TestDisk and Photorec too.
What do you mainly use?
I, typically, use one of the forensic Linux distros and the open source tools that you mention, especially TestDisk and Photorec. For most of my pure data recovery tasks, people are interested in getting back only certain files and not recovering the entire system, especially if it can't be done, easily.
For these kinds of tasks, I can boot Linux quickly and get right to work rather than waiting for a FTK or EnCase to finish their tasks.
One other thing that I should have added If you are serious about this business, dedicate a percentage of your revenue to capital improvements and some research and experimentation. It is great if all that you want to do is make some extra money but if you want more than that, i.e., to grow this into a primary business, then you'll need to make some investments for the future. Your margins may be so low that you can't afford to do this, at first, but if you have anything to set aside from a good case it is a good idea to do that.
Also consider whether you want to offer fixed-price (shared risk) services. Some people in this business will do that for certain kinds of jobs because they know that someone who is looking at keeping recovery costs under a budget will prefer fixed price to fee-for-service.
Mark,
I'm also in the UK and have been considering doing a very similar thing. I've been doing it for free for friends and friends of friends for some time.
I though about approaching a couple of the small PC build & repair shops to see if they can push any business my way.
Where about in the UK are you - I don't want to poach your business (I'm in the west midlands)
The thoughts about pricing are very interesting. So far it's been limited to a couple of bottles of wine for me.
Pual