(This vendor no longer offers Crystal Reports file recovery)

A user recently sent me a Crystal Reports file that seemed to be corrupted. Every time he tried to open it Crystal would crash. I tried it myself using several versions of Crystal and got the same results. I told him that there was no way I knew of to recover the file and hoped that he had a backup of an older version. He didn’t, and the report represented several weeks of work. Lesson number one. Keep some interim backups.

But, later that same day he told me that he found a company that was able to recover the file. They charged him $99 and turned it around the same day. The company is called E-Tech Recovery Inc. and they specialize in data recovery.

I contacted the company and they said that $99 is a typical price for a Crystal Recovery and they have had a pretty good success rate. They will make the attempt for free and give you a quote if they can fix it. If you feel the quote is too high you can decline. They also mentioned that In the cases they’ve seen, the files get corrupted because they were open
when either Windows or a Crystal DLL crashed.

If you have had experience with Crystal file corruptions or with companies that recover corrupted files, please send me a note or post a comment to this entry.