LC Technology International

Anyone who comments badly on this company or others like it, clearly do not know how file recovery works…
File recovery is never guaranteed, you pay for the service, which is simply an attempt at recovering any data.
Maybe if people knew this (it is very basic information) they wouldn’t get so upset.

Scam. They charged me $ 275 on a 32 GB card and were only able to recover not even 1 GB. I asked for a reduction in price due to the recovery failure, they were very rude and said they never offer credits. Do not use this company as a service

Avoid at all costs! They are a fraudulent company that sells products that don’t work. Customer service is ⁰⁄₁₀ and will not help when you can’t open your photos. All the reviews below are unfortunately true.

DO NOT BUY FILERECOVERY, PHOTORECOVERY, or any other products from
. The software doesn’t work and the company has completely unreasonable customer service. Their demo version indicates the software is able to undelete many files, but once you pay for the full version, you come to find that those files are full of total junk in most cases — it can only recover a few files successfully, while the unrelated free and open source program PhotoRec can recover many thousand files correctly from the same drive in my case. However, LC Technology OFFERS NO REFUNDS, EVER.
Note that LC Technology gets a grade of «F» from the Better Business Bureau, based on complaints received:
The CEO David Zimmerman (
) profits from selling people in dire need of file recovery substandard software and then refusing a refund.
I had the same experience as the previous reviewers: the Lc Technology FILERECOVERY software is complete and utter junk. FILERECOVERY did not handle any file types correctly — Word, JPEG, video, or even text files. I looked at file contents with a binary file viewer, and the files don’t even contain the right sorts of contents or file signatures for the supposedly-​recovered filetype.
I called Lc Tech, and was told that there were no refunds, even though they sold me a non-​functional product. I asked to speak to a manager, and the only manager is the president of the company, David Zimmerman. He does not speak to customers, other than accepting voicemail, and I was told that he may or may not choose to call you back, but was told that he almost certainly wouldn’t, and that he has never granted a refund even once in the history of the company.
*** If you have already bought the software, ask to speak to Alex in tech support, he has very good technical knowledge and is a nice guy — the only reasonable person I have spoken to out of several people in the company. He may be able to help you figure out how to get the software working better. (He can’t get you a refund though.) ***
Otherwise, just stick to the free program PhotoRec, it works pretty well.

As a photographer probably our worst collective nightmare is the failure of technology. Whether it be a hard drive or a compact flash card, not being able to deliver captured memories to your paying clients is not only a huge disappointment, but a reflection of your professionalism — even if the data loss wasn’t your fault. That was the unfortunate boat I was in a few weeks ago, a compact flash card failed. After shooting a portrait session with some 300+ images I was unable to get the card to read on any of my computers. It had no physical damage, but obviously something was up. So left without many options I knew that I could either A) re-​shoot the session and risk upsetting the client, or B) first attempt to recover the files. B sounded like a more pleasant phone conversation. So I sent the card in to LC Technology because they are the company San Disk recommends on their website. $ 225 to recover a 16GB card.
When they received the card the representative (I’ve only dealt with one person) told me that he had exhausted what he could attempt with software and that he’d have to have a technician pull the chips out. Sounded pretty ominous. It was slow going but a day or two later I got a message from someone that they had success! Only a COUPLE (yes that was their terminology) of images were unsalvageable. Le sigh.
When I got the CD back from them only about 50% of the images were able to be opened in Lightroom. So obviously having expected to be able to use all but maybe a handful of the images I was obviously disappointed. The following is the dialog via email between myself and their representative:
Me– «Quite a few of the files that I had selected to edit that looked normal (previewed fine in Photomechanic) could not be opened in Lightroom. The error message was, „An unexpected end of file occurred.“ Ultimately 172 of the 320 files suffered either from this message or were just completely corrupt. I ended up having to extract the JPEG previews from Photomechanic to find enough usable files to deliver to the client. I’m thankful that I had enough to do this, but pretty disappointed that we were told to expect only a couple of files to not be recoverable. It would seem to me that some sort of partial refund might be in order.»
Him– «Lightroom is very particular about what it will open. We have found that saving a raw file in any other program rewrites the markers and then the file will open in Lightroom.»
Me– «Okay… well the only other program I used that opens RAW files is Adobe Camera RAW which had less success than Lightroom. Can you recommend to me anything that will open the files? Over 50% of the files you guys sent back to me I can’t do anything with.»
Him– «Everything should open in Faststone. «
Me– «Okay, I’ve never heard of Faststone. I looked it up, and it doesn’t appear to have a Mac compatible version. Also if I was going to need to pay for additional software to be able to view the files you guys were sending I feel like that should have been communicated up front. To be honest I’m not getting the impression you are interested in helping me, is there another person within your company that you can refer me to?»
Him– «I have been stalling waiting to get with the tech who did the recovery.»
Me– «I suppose that is potentially good news. If rerunning it produces images that I can open in Lightroom and/​or ACR can you guys overnight a disc to me? I am beginning to get into a time crunch with delivering the session to the client.»
Him– «We should be able to upload them to an FTP site.»
I was a bit surprised by his admission to stalling for time. How about just telling me the truth? Anyhow a couple of days later he emails me again —
Him– «Upon further testing, it was not a setting issue but data errors. These can be repaired manually but it takes an hour or so for each photo. Our head of support is willing to do this for a few photos if you can provide the image numbers for one that you really need.»
Well at this point I think he should have been more than willing. I paid to get this data back and it’s not my fault that what they initially sent me hadn’t been checked out to even work. But I sent him in 10 or files that I would like to have saved. A day later I get a link to download some files. I get back 150 TIFF files (mind you I really am wanting RAW), some that I already had. Seriously weird. And I highly doubt this technician spent 150 man hours working on it.
Ultimately I will be able to deliver my photos to my client, and no re-​shoot was necessary. LC Tech was really a lifesaver, albeit one with poor communication skills. I still think some sort of partial refund was in order but at the end of the day the client having their photos is all that matters.