While this article will go into more detail regarding the overwhelming unreliability of American shipping services and the effect it is having in terms of data loss, I would like a moment to first give a brief description and example of the effects caused from a critical data loss.

Let’s use a small business for example.  This business contributes to the backbone of America by creating employment and paying taxes along with providing important services for their clients.  The data stored on their hard drives contained their business portfolios, medical research, databases, and personal images that they cannot imagine never seeing again for personal reasons.  This business researches “data recovery” and becomes completely overwhelmed with advertisements promising everything from cheap, flat rate service to perfect success rates and diagnostics.  After many frustrating conversations with salesmen advertising local, safe, fast, and even courier pickups, they soon realize they are being lured to ship out their precious failed hard drive to an unknown “engineer”.  Learn more about how to find a real data recovery laboratory –>

How can this be if nearly all computer shops, managed solution providers, and even Best Buy, Staples and Micro Center offer this service?  This is the result of an unregulated industry in America and the dirty business of outsourcing.  Computer technicians and sales representatives advertising a service without a proper understanding of what’s involved.  Many times tampering with the damaged drive (causing further damage to the media device from negligence).  We say “tampering” because without proper knowledge of how a device is engineered or access to the professional tools to diagnose the issue, it’s just plain tampering.  They then send it out to a third party with or without your knowledge for a ballooned quote if the data is still salvageable and not lost through transit or malpractice.

Shipping to outsourced companies

The increasing concern of shipping your irreplaceable data to an outside source has been justified in many ways.  Since 2016 we have kept records of shipping delays and losses from reputable shipping providers in America.  We have made many complaints to the corporations and even placed door tags to show our concern to the careless delivery drivers.  We must continuously address the situation usually caused from frequent, irregular changes in drivers.

Shipping Risks Are Real

Nobody watches a parcel. It is collected, scanned, sorted, loaded, flown or driven, sorted again and delivered, and it passes through dozens of pairs of hands and half a dozen machines before it reaches anyone who knows what is inside it. Along the way it gets thrown, stacked under heavier freight, and dropped. A tracking page records where a barcode was read. It records nothing about how the box was treated between those readings.

That is one journey. Now consider what happens before the journey even starts. A counter takes the drive in and may run recovery software on it, which on a physically failing drive spends whatever life is left. It is packed by someone with no stake in whether it survives. It travels. A partner facility receives it. Somewhere in that sequence, the question of who was holding your only copy on any given afternoon simply stops having an answer.

A retail counter has no access control, no custody log, no agreement with you about who may open your files, and no way to tell you who handled the drive between Tuesday and Friday. None of that appears on a quote. All of it is a cost.

What that looks like when it goes wrong. In 2023 a drive was posted to us from Bucks County and did not arrive when it should have. USPS tracking showed the parcel bypass our facility, travel to Philadelphia, and sit there for several days before finally being delivered here. It was addressed to us the entire time. When it arrived it was unrecoverable, and it did not match the description its owner had given us. A police report was filed.

We cannot tell you what happened to that drive in those days. Neither can anybody else, and that is precisely the problem. A gap in a chain of custody is invisible while it is happening and only appears afterwards, by which point the drive itself is the only evidence of what it went through. Its owner had done nothing careless. She had put her only copy into a process with more hands in it than she had been told about.

So the question worth asking is not how far the drive is going. It is how many separate journeys it has to survive, and who can actually account for it at each end.

Avoid shipping if possible and just take the short ride to our safe suburb of Philadelphia.  

Still prefer to ship? Go to our packaging and shipping instructions page to mitigate the risks , and choose a carrier that gives you tracking and signature confirmation.

Based on our own years of shipping experience, here’s how we’d rank the major U.S. carriers for sending something as irreplaceable as a failed drive:

UPS — our first choice. In our experience, the most consistent and reliable for handling packages that matter. This is what we recommend for domestic shipments.

DHL — excellent for international. We’ve had strong results with DHL and recommend it especially for shipments coming from outside the U.S.

FedEx — usable, with tracking. We’ve experienced more delays and inconsistent pickups with FedEx over the years than with UPS. If you ship FedEx, we’d strongly suggest signature confirmation and keeping your tracking number handy.

USPS — use a premium service if you must. For standard mail we’ve seen more delays and rerouting than we’re comfortable with for critical data. If USPS is your only option, use Priority or Express Mail with tracking to reduce the risk of delay or loss.

Whichever carrier you choose: insure the package, require a signature, and hold onto your tracking number. And remember — the safest shipping method is no shipping at all. If you’re within driving distance, dropping your drive off in person eliminates transit risk entirely.