Seagate Launches Data Recovery Service at Staples

Seagate Technology's Recovery Services division is offering a new set of data recovery services for consumers and businesses at 1,400 Staples stores in North America and Hawaii.

Staples, the world's largest office products company, is fronting the services through its in-store EasyTech services staff. The chain began offering the services Nov. 20.

Customers can walk up to the EasyTech counter and drop off any make or brand of digital storage container—hard drives from laptops, desktops, iPods, or external drives; RAID storage arrays; flash drives; optical drives; digital videocams; and tape and optical media, including CDs and DVDs.

In each store, Staples staff will utilize Seagate Recovery Services expertise and resources to provide a free evaluation of the media, determine the cost of recovery and, once approved by the customer, try to recover the data.

"Its sort of like the relationship GeekSquad has with Best Buy," Jay Remley, president of Seagate Recovery Services, told eWEEK. "There isn't a lot of investment from Staples in this new service, outside of some training. Seagate is handling all the recovery services itself."

To read about Seagate rolling out its recovery services to its channel partners, click here.

Service costs will vary, but most hard drive data recovery projects will cost between about $200 and $2,000, Remley said.

Data loss can be caused by mechanical failure of a device, contamination, fire or water damage, human error or other factors. In most cases, the data can be recovered by trained technicians by using a combination of software technologies and physical reconstruction of the device, Remley said.

He said the services include the guarantee that if Seagate and Staples can't recover the data, there will be no charge to the customer.

"Were pretty confident about what we can do," Remley said. "We've found that we can save data about 98 percent of the time."

When the data is recovered from bad digital storage, it will be returned to the customer on an external USB hard drive with a two-year limited warranty.

"If a customer drops off an 80GB hard drive, for example, well return the data on a similar-quality 80GB external drive, with a simple USB connector," Remley said. "So all the customer has to do is plug it in, and the data will all be poured back into the new drive or device."

Earlier this year, Seagate extended its Recovery Services programs to a network of 14,000 channel partners in North America. This allows channel partners to share revenues at various tiers when Seagate Recovery Services are used.

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