Or even if you don't feel totally confident! I just don't want to get incompetent-quasi-scammed.
Do you mean the storage drives are failing? I once took a laptop to repair/recovery and they quickly worked out that the laptop would never boot but the drive was ok. I ended up buying an enclosure for the drive and connecting it to another computer via usb. They were kind enough to remove the drive, something I wasn't used to doing.
Or maybe that's the kind of service you're looking for? Unfortunately, I have no recommendations. This was service at a Fry's, which no longer exists.
Jammies had an external server as our file storage which was split in half and supposed to mirror our files in both? (I really don't have the vocab down.) One half is starting to fail, and we discovered the other half never got turned on. So before we go through the troubleshooting steps that the company wants us to try, we want to get the files off the failing half (if possible).
It was a RAID1 but the redundant part wasn't actually on so it's a RAID0. Or I guess not even a RAID at all since everything was on one drive.
There's a place near us that's supposed to be good but that seems inconvenient for you.
It depends on the failure mode and the file system type. Mac or PC drive?
3: Oh, if it's one of those specialized storage things, yeah, that sounds like it's the disk itself. Wasn't sure if server meant a more contained computer beyond storage.
If you needed help with floppies or other pre-2005 hardware, I think the place I used to recommend for that is still in business. I continue to not be helpful, sorry.
I appreciate the effort though! The reddit subreddit on data recovery maintains a list of reputable shops, so we're thinking right now that we'll go through one of those.
If the thing is still responding (e.g. it's working but the SMART monitoring on the disk controller is throwing errors) it would be wise to get a straight bit-wise copy of the whole thing before doing anything else. That way, any fiddling is done to the copy not the original, and of course the copy can itself be cloned before interfering with it.
In a Linux environment the dd command will do that, like so dd if=/dev/heebiebaddiskhere of=/media/heebieotherdisk/copy.img
Also obviously keep any passphrase you use for the disk.
I'll ask Jammies for a better answer, but basically he's only able to grab small files at a time before it gets hung up? So he's able to get 5 photos at a time, but not videos etc. Does that mean it would still be possible to get a bit-wise copy of the whole thing?
I'm thinking it would be best to do this without even mounting the file system.