Hard Drive Recovery no password

Andrew_E7

New Member
I have a WD hard drive which suffered external damage when it was dropped. This actually happened over a year ago and I found a reasonably priced data recovery place to see if the data can be recovered. I am thinking that it can be rescued either by performing a platter swap (I also gave them an identical donor drive) or by mirroring the data unto the newer drive. However, my damaged drive is encrypted by Veracrypt and I can't remember the exact encryption key (password). I hope I can remember it after I get the drive back after several strong guesses.

My question is can data recovery see the contents of my hard drive without the password (which I prefer they don't see my contents)? More importantly, can they mirror the contents of the data to the new drive without the password with at least moderate success? Please advise thank you!
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
If you encrypted the drive, the entire disk will still be encrypted. They can possibly clone the data but I would not guarantee it.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
My question is can data recovery see the contents of my hard drive without the password (which I prefer they don't see my contents)?
Not really, it depends. They probably don't care enough to try to break the password if it's reasonably complex.
ore importantly, can they mirror the contents of the data to the new drive without the password with at least moderate success?
Possibly, you can 1:1 copy a volume of encrypted data without knowing the key, you're simply just making a mirror copy of data that already exists. Being able to recover the data physically would strongly depend on a variety of factors and there's zero guarantee.

Backups are always exponentially less expensive than recovery.
 
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