Hastings computer service DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY

[annabel_vega]

Having supplied this company to transfer a meat 7.4gb of data from my mother in laws old laptop, this firm decided to take it upon themselves, to reformat our external hardrive, due to the fact that 'they said' it was corrupt. No phone all, no nothing! I cannot believe any professional computer related business would think it appropriate to mess about with somebody else's property, without so much as a phone all. Had they have told me, that they believed the existing data to be irretrievable, I would have asked them to return my hard drive to me and supplied a DVD for the external data of my mother-in-laws but instead thet reformatted our hardrive! We have one lost over GBP50,000 pictures of our children. All of the babybphoto's so precious to us. I can't believe now , I was so stupid to give it to them in the first place. Devastating. DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY!

[Richard]

I am not clear exactly what you asked the Company to do or what they agreed to do.
They must presumably have put something in writing for you to sign?
They all have a general (copy) disclaimer in their list of terms and conditions but this does not allow them to do anything without any liability whatsoever.
Did the company get you to sign a document saying you had a backup in the first place ? and for waiver of liablity/limitation of any damage claim that can be laid at their door?
No, in which case they probably did not get a Solicitor to draw up their business plan to protect themselves against potential legal claims.

It won't necessarily get all or any of your priceless images back but it may be worth trying to get a data recovery specialist to try to recover what they can from the formatted hard drive and ask the Hastings Computer Service Company to cover the cost.
I mean you could put this suggestion to the Company who formatted the drive.

[Herring_Gull]

Keep the hard drive - Do not save any data on it.

The data can be recovered BUT it will cost.

Search google using this term:

recovering data deleted from hard drive