Data Recovery Company

Gillware is the data recovery company you can turn to when you need help. Whatever situation you’re in, we’ve been there and we’ve seen it dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times before in our lab.

Gillware is a leading Data Recovery Company located in Wisconsin, United States. We are a small-medium sized enterprise business with a great family heritage. We have grown significantly throughout our history by hiring and nurturing some of the very best talents in the industry.

A handful of the data recovery experts in our data recovery company
Gillware Engineers

Our data recovery specialists and data scientists are subject matter experts who have tens of thousands of hours of experience between them in almost all conceivable storage devices created in the last 20 years.

This experience allows new and veteran Gillware employees to gain extensive knowledge on all kinds of data recovery scenarios for all leading hardware manufactures, including most of the obscure ones, too.

Our ability to recover data from some of the most complex cases imaginable and maintain robust security best practices keeps our clients coming back. We pride ourselves on our repeat clients and the relationships that we have built with them over the years.

We are known for our expertise in hard drive recovery, and our hard drive recovery services and data recovery solutions are second to none. Mechanical hard drives, Solid State Disks, and NVMe are frequently being repaired within our data labs.

As the performance and longevity of storage technology increase, our data labs have adapted and developed new techniques to recover data. We are seeing a rising trend of QLC (Quad Level Cells) for repair; this solid-state, high capacity storage is extensively used in Machine Learning and AI platforms.

Our experts are capable of restoring data from damaged smartphones, helium-filled hard drives, perpendicular track technology, and even encrypted data! This cutting-edge expert capability to recover data is one reason Gillware is trusted by the US government and US healthcare institutions for data recovery.

Did you also know that Gillware works with our enterprise clients to recover fully virtualized environments when things go wrong? It doesn’t matter if the business is running Hyper-V, VMWare, Xen, or Openstack. Our experts ready to recover data in virtual environments whenever the need arises.

The Gillware Story

Tyler Gill
Tyler Gill
Brian Gill

Gillware’s story began over fifteen years ago. Brian and Tyler Gill created Gillware in 2003 to address a need for affordable, customer-friendly computer data recovery services. The company was founded after Tyler Gill experienced a hard disk failure at college, leaving him stranded without his valuable data.

The local data recovery provider was quoting ludicrous figures for the repair (around $3000); needless to say, it was money that very few college undergraduates could afford. With their expertise and experience with computer and mechanical engineering, the Gill brothers researched hard drive data recovery tools and recovery methods for data storage devices. The brothers then set out to teach themselves how to repair broken hard disk drives and save recovered data. Their success rates were very high, and eventually, led the brothers to rapidly disrupt the data recovery service provider industry.

Since those early days of two self-taught data recovery engineers putting their computer science backgrounds to work in a basement, we have emerged as a data recovery company with some of the best and brightest minds in the entire industry engaging in research and development in the latest recovery techniques. We now employ over a dozen full-time, security vetted data recovery professionals with state-of-the-art tools, data recovery software, and technology that won’t be found in any other data recovery labs.

Gillware was founded on the principle that hard drive data recovery should not be prohibitively expensive to anyone, and today, Gillware Data Recovery has expanded rapidly with these core values, ensuring data security, fair pricing, and the principle of only paying for successful data recovery – whether recovering flash drives or massive RAID configurations.

Today, Gillware has expanded into a world-class data recovery service provider that now offers digital forensics, incident response, and e-discovery services along with the ever-popular secure data recovery service and our emergency data recovery options.

If you are looking for an affordable and competitive data recovery company, look no further. Our Madison-based lab is staffed with ace data recovery experts, making it easy for us to offer a world-class data recovery service at lower prices than other device labs.

Of course, what’s important to us isn’t that we deliver cheap services–it’s that we are a provider of the best storage media services in the most efficient way.

A Data Recovery Company You Can Depend On

At Gillware, our expert data recovery engineers repair failed hard drives, flash drives, and more in ISO 5 certified Class 100 cleanroom benches. We utilize cutting-edge proprietary technologies and recovery software of our own design, such as our intelligent forensic imaging software and hard drive platter burnisher. Whether you have a broken hard drive, snapped USB drives, a dead SD card, an unresponsive solid-state drive, or a dozen failed hard drives in a RAID server with ESXi virtual machines, we know better than anyone else how to recover your data.

Our data security engineers and data scientists have recovered customer data from some seemingly impossible scenarios; fire, and water damage media are not uncommon, but it can be a painstaking process for our experts to rebuild the data for the client. Usually this involves stripping the disk’s internal components, repairing disk platters with our burnishing tool, and then rebuilding the disk using spare parts from our extensive spare part library. Our library of spares is extensive, featuring most makes and models, and each part is carefully cataloged by our data recovery experts, allowing us to audit what parts are in stock and available for our data recovery services.

Gillware runs a secure data lab that maintains the confidentiality of clients of all sorts, including the healthcare industry and government agencies on the federal, state, and local levels. We are proud of the relationships we have built with our healthcare and government partners, and their support is one of the most crucial elements of our data recovery company.

Gillware Data Recovery is a HIPAA compliant data recovery company that guarantees to uphold the integrity of protected health information (PHI). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. In the last 25 years, the technical, administrative, and physical safeguards of HIPAA have evolved to include the Privacy and Security Amendment Acts of 2003. Our teams are specially trained to handle sensitive healthcare cases, and if the PHI stored on your device is in scope, rest assured that Gillware has the diligence and credibility to provide secure data recovery for your healthcare data.

For governmental contracts, Gillware is a US General Services Administration (GSA) contract holder. This means that we meet all of the necessary security requirements that allow government agencies to use our services without worrying about the safety of their data. This accreditation proves that Gillware’s secure data recovery services are the very best in the industry.

Our headquarters and lab are locked and monitored, with every employee fully screened and background-checked. To ensure secure data recovery, any data we recover only leaves our building when we send it back to our client, and our post-data recovery drive sanitation procedure completely erases all of the data we recover from our facility once the client’s data is in their hands.

Why Gillware is a Leader in the Data Recovery Industry….

Groundbreaking achievements in RAID data recovery, virtual machine recovery, and more

Warranty arrangements with all major manufacturers, including Western Digital, Seagate, and more

Excels in more data recovery scenarios than any other data recovery company

Secure data recovery facilities make us the best choice for sensitive business data, including ePHI

Approved and preferred by over 5,000 computer repair and managed IT service providers across the US

Approved by major vendors such as Dell and VMware

What to Look For in a Data Recovery Company

When Gillware was founded, there were no sensible data recovery options for home users or small businesses. All professional data recovery companies catered their data recovery service toward large corporations or other organizations with big budgets and for whom, they assumed, data loss had higher stakes, and their data recovery services were priced accordingly.

But losing data has high stakes for small businesses and home users too, and Gillware’s mission since the day of its founding has been to make the same professional, world-class, in-lab data recovery services available for everyone. Gillware was the first to offer financially risk-free data recovery services with free in-lab evaluations and no upfront costs or fees for unsuccessful data recovery attempts.

Gillware's hard disk drive burnishing technology
Gillware’s hard disk drive burnishing technology

The secure data recovery landscape has changed much in the past fifteen years, with many other data recovery companies now offering the services Gillware originally pioneered. While there are only a handful of professional data recovery companies in the United States, data recovery is a more customer-service focused field than it was fifteen years ago (and we’d like to take some of the credit for that).

But, of course, Gillware is still the best data recovery company you can choose, and we excel in hard drive recovery, secure data recovery, and everything else on the spectrum of data recovery.

Here are some of the things we do to make that claim more than just hot air:

A Professional Lab…

First things first, secure data recovery needs… a lab. The Gillware Lab HQ is located in Madison, Wisconsin. We are a leader in data recovery, our expert lab is over 14,000 square feet and our specialists perform over 15,000 in-lab data recoveries every year!

The hard drive recovery process, for example, should only ever be conducted in an environment that meets ISO 5 Class 100 standards. In almost all circumstances, our data recovery engineers will need to open the hard drive, flash drive, or external hard drive to have any chance of a successful recovery. The clean environment gives us the best opportunity for a 100% success rate and getting recovered data off a hard drive.

Any recovery process should only ever be attempted in a proper data recovery lab, one in which failed storage media can be safely repaired without introducing contaminants into the devices’ delicate innards. If a client attempts the data recovery process at home, contaminants will be everywhere and almost certainly cause additional data loss.

In the hard drive recovery business, the ISO standard is incredibly important. The ISO standards achieved by Gillware refer to how many small particles per cubic foot are permitted in the air. For example, ISO 5 Class 100 means that there can only be at most 100,000 0.5-micrometer particles per cubic meter of air.

This is the level of cleanliness an engineer needs to avoid letting dust particles into a hard drive while working on it, which can cause complications and defeat the purpose of any repairs made. Descending numbers of ISO ratings correspond to decreased particle tolerance and higher cleanliness. But any higher standards than ISO 5, for the purposes of data recovery at least, are, quite frankly, overkill.

If you see a lab advertise ISO 4 or below, all that really means is that they’re spending money they don’t need on a cleanroom that they don’t need for a data recovery service to impress you and passing the cost to you.

Setting the Record Straight on Cleanrooms

When people think of cleanrooms, they think of… well, rooms. A perfectly white, perfectly sterile room with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling designed to keep so much as a single germ out. A worker dressed from head to toe in pure white Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

This is the kind of cleanroom you see in sci-fi thriller movies about genetically-engineered pathogens that can wipe out all of humanity. For repairing hard drives or flash drives, though, it’s overkill.

Full cleanroom enclosures are big, expensive to set up, expensive to maintain, and hard to move. One of the ways Gillware has managed to keep the costs of data recovery service down without sacrificing the quality of work is by using modular cleanroom benches. We have numerous cleanroom benches installed around the Madison lab, allowing data recovery cases to be worked consecutively.

While perhaps not quite as photogenic, these units provide the same clean workspace for our data recovery engineers, class 100 cleanroom environments that are perfect for hard drive recovery, they prevent data loss and help us achieve certified data recovery.

Each cleanroom is audited quarterly by independent inspectors, and the money Gillware saves on maintenance and upkeep translates into lower costs for our customers.

Do you need help recovering data? Contact Gillware today to take advantage of our free evaluation services, our experts offer a no data no charge policy, get in touch today, our digital forensics team is standing by to help you.

…And the Data Recovery Experts to Fill It

Of course, a data recovery lab is useless without the people to fill it. A data recovery lab needs digital forensics experts who can handle just about every data loss situation for just about any data storage device. It needs veteran computer engineers with years of experience and an exemplary success rate, engineers who know the ins and outs of every single kind of RAID array, are experts in raid recovery, and understand certified data recovery for virtualization platforms from top to bottom.

It needs computer engineers who know so much about how various file systems work that the only people who know more are the people who made them in the first place. It needs people who can learn to read a hard drive’s firmware, people with steady hands who can swap out a set of failed read/write heads on a hard drive, electrical engineers, and so much more.

As you can probably tell, we have so much respect for our certified data recovery experts; they are truly what sets Gillware apart from our competitors. Many of them have been with Gillware from the very beginning, passing on their highly skilled services to our newer employees and adding to our expertise in data loss recovery.

Gillware: A Preferred Data Recovery Partner

Gillware is a preferred data recovery company for tens of thousands of clients across America and the rest of the world, successfully solving well over 130,000 data recovery cases in our history. Gillware Data Recovery helps thousands of computer repair professionals, IT consultants, managed service providers, corporate IT departments, small business owners, university IT departments, and end-users across the world every year.

Gillware’s Partner Program

Our data recovery partners include over 5,000 computer repair businesses and managed IT services providers across the United States. These thousands of partners trust us as the best choice for their customers’ and clients’ data recovery needs. Our partnerships are symbiotic relationships, allowing small businesses in the industry to grow and widen the array of services they offer to customers in need. If you often encounter customers and clients in need of data recovery services at your business and wish you could do more to help them and improve customer service in data recovery, get in touch with us to talk about becoming a Gillware Partner.

Among other worldwide vendors, Gillware Data Recovery also has a data recovery partnership with Dell. If your hard drive has failed and you own a Dell PC, simply get in touch with a Dell support agent. Gillware will then work with you and your Dell support agent to recover your data. Dell will either help you send your hard drive to us or provide you with access to RecoverBot, a stripped-down version of our forensic analysis software for use outside our lab.

With 15 Years in the Business, Gillware is Trusted & Well-Reviewed

Our customers can be sure they’re getting the best data recovery services possible. Once you’ve submitted a data recovery case through our secure online portal, sending your failed storage device to Gillware’s lab is simple.

All you have to do is package your storage device (with plenty of padding), then affix the printable shipping label we provide you to the box and drop off the box at any UPS drop-off site. We’ll let you know as soon as your device reaches our lab.

Once our engineers perform a free in-lab evaluation, run their diagnostics, and determine how much data is recoverable from your storage device and how much work we’ll need to do, we will give you a firm price quote for further data recovery efforts and work with you to define clear goals for our engineers. You will not pay us a dime unless we meet your goals and get your data back at a price that makes sense to you. Remember, no data no charge!

If you would like to contact us to receive a no-pressure consultation, click the button below. This will take you to a page with our phone number and email. This page also provides you with the option to schedule an appointment with a Client Advisor at a later time or date, or chat with them online.

Click the button below if you would like to send in your device. Sending in your device is financially risk-free. You will be asked to fill out a short form. Once you have completed the form, we will send a shipping label to the address provided. After we receive your device, we will begin a free evaluation and contact you with a firm price quote.