Sherlock Data Recovery

Based on my experience, the prior reviews are not made up, but its not as bad as that. The description: this is an individual who runs a data recovery service out of his apartment on the upper east side. The GOOD: 1) he is local in manhattan, you can go directly to meet with him and work with him; 2) he is skilled and knowledgeable about hard drives; 3) he genuinely wants to recover your data and gets satisfaction out of a successful recovery. He did correctly diagnose that my drive was in bad shape and he copied it expertly, which down the line I may be very thankful for. The BAD: well, you see it in the previous reviews: a) he did not actually find the file I was looking for; b) his site says no charge if no recovery, but he does indeed require $ 150 to run a diagnostic, for which you have to leave your drive/​laptop; c) he is paranoid about being taken advantage of, which leads to some poor communication and unprofessionalism (you see it in the prior reviews, for me he insisted that he had found the file I was looking for when he hadn’t…as if I don’t know what my own data looks like). Bottom line: he did not find the file I was looking for and DID charge me, so that’s false advertising, so I can’t give a good review. However, he did diagnose my failing hard drive and copied it (realize how tricky it is to copy all the data off a failing drive) before an even bigger disaster, so he knows what he is doing. I think as long as you have the time (WEEKS!) to wait for your data and he succeeds, which he will try really hard to do, everyone is happy. But he does not handle the client’s expectations well and then handles it very poorly when he does not succeed in meeting those expectations leading to the problems you see in the reviews, which means I can’t really recommend him except as a last resort.

He has since changed the name of his business to «Sherlock Data Recovery». Now I keep getting harassing email to take my review off of Unilocal.I still have not gotten my drive back from him. Thankfully I could live without the data. I had also reported him to the Better Business Bureau. I don’t have an axe to grind but I tought other ppl might like to know his business practices.

My back-​up HD died. It was a nightmare and I had to get the 10 years of files back. I was quoted up to $ 2,000 to get the data back. After speaking with Ephraim (owner) on the phone — I felt a lot better. He was calm, informative and not aggressive. He offered to review the HD for a reasonable fee and we eventually agreed on a fee to recover the data. I brought a new HD to him and I had all my data back within a couple of days.
With so many scary places — even on this sight, I have to recommend Atomic for professionalism, price and quality of work. Thanks Ephraim!

Please, please, please, do NOT leave your valuable data and equipment with Ephraim! He runs his business out of his apartment and once you drop your stuff off with him, he will «repair» it and then tell you it was a delicate and impossible process that only he could do and send you a bill for $ 1200 – 5000. After he threatened to destroy my data if I didn’t pay up, I threatened to call the police. He handed over my hard drive and I left. I had to cancel all my credit cards and change all of my pws because he made a copy of my drive and kept it. I called the Better Biz Bureau and this man has 5 investigations pending. Call them and see for yourself! After I took what Ephraim diagnosed as a «super-​damaged Category 5» hard drive to a friend, my friend managed to restore my data with a $ 60 hard drive reader. The headache of losing data is bad enough without having to be bullied and extorted on top of it. PM if you have any questions, want more info!