First of all, it is a totally personal opinion without any proof.

Act One: Acelabs, a leading company in DR systems has a problem. After the undeniable initial success of the brand, its infrastructure has grown a lot, at the pace of its commercial success, and also its need for economic resources to maintain the infrastructure, but once covered the initial demand, sales do not grow at the same rate. It is difficult to find new potential clients in a relatively new and very closed business.
Offering payment facilities on your product could be a solution to attract new customers, but your brand would lose prestige and the trust of your customers. The solution?

Act Two: You find an unknown Chinese company that has mediocre MRT WH data recovery software and offers you its collaboration. Thus was born what we know today as MRT, Acelab provides reduced and modified versions of its software (but with considerable potential), support in the design of its hardware... etc.

The condition? high royalties in the sales of the product and most importantly, a high final cost of the product for the customer (being what was MRT) but with unbeatable payment facilities.

Third act: AceLabs returns to earn money through their royalties, a lot of new people (potential customers of ACE, who pay their product 2 times) are introduced into the DR business even some of their customers also buy their white label product. A percentage of MRT buyers who start in the business and make their first income end up buying PC3K products... the market reactivates exponentially, makes public their PC3K forum to give theoretical resources to their potential new customers, etc..

And those who don't switch to PC3K, well.....

Act Four: Leave your second brand without support, and if you want to stay in the market you know what you have to do...

Remember that all this is a figment of my imagination... or Not.

I would have thought that Ace Lab's expansion occurred well before MRT came onto the scene.

When I joined this forum, data recovery was an elitist, secretive "club" with few public resources. This "closed shop" attitude must have been self defeating for tool suppliers such as Ace Lab -- how do you sell tools to people who don't know that you, or your industry, exist? ISTM that there has been an explosion in the number of DR shops since Ace opened up its forum. I would also like to think that the changes at HDD Guru, the creation of the HDD Oracle, and the introduction of inexpensive "starter" tools (eg SeDiv, SHTR, WDMarvel) did a lot to attract the interest of new players. At least that's what feedback would suggest.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I agree and that's why I say MRT was ACE's white label.

The way to bring all that potential customer growth to your business, without losing your reputation, would be with a tool very similar to yours, limited and virtually unsupported, but affordable to most of those potential customers, thanks to your financing program, although its final price was not much less than the basic PC3K UDMA.

Very few people, no matter how much they visited this forum or others, were going to buy PC3K without a minimum experience in DR, however MRT was within reach and appearance and its working system very similar to PC3K.

Then you disappear and we close the circle.

I searched for articles on the projected growth of data recovery and found this pay-for-view report:

https://marketresearchupdates.com/2019/05/24/massive-growth-data-recovery-services-market-2025-high-cagr-coming-years-focusing-key-players-like-ibm-sims-recycling-dell-lenovo-hpe-minntek-atlantix-avnet-northstar-iqor-pc/


What do Garner "Insights" understand by "data recovery"? How does a recycling company come to feature as a major player? Where is Kroll Ontrack?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

You speak of MRT in the past tense. Are you suggesting that they have already gone the way of Salvation Data?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I do not know the history of salvation data, since I was never a client of that brand and I did not follow its evolution.

MRT, not dead, you can still buy it and if you are an online user, you will have to continue paying the fees, but there will be no more updates, it will remain active as long as it can generate money.

Administrative staff, yes, development and support staff, NO (if ever there were....)

It's my opinion....

ISTM that your conspiracy theory would be less implausible if the white label company were within the legal jurisdiction of Russia or the EU.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The question of whether MRT are going the way of salvationdata ,floating a long time and it's nightmare of a lot former salvation and MRT users but in my opinion it's not related to ACE it's related to chinese companies standard,and if MRT will fall no one ever ever will trust chinese companies in the DR field again.
I remember with salvationdata the sign was first meaningless updates then cessation.
The latest update of MRT was in february and I must say it was helpful one,if there will not be update in the coming month I would say the risk of something bad happens rise.

Speaking of conspiracy more likely to say sediv is white label of ACE to compete MRT without lowering pc3k prices.

Not Ace labs style.....

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

I believe ACELabs don't need to do any partnership with anyone (specially MRT). It's not their way of doing business and keep clients happy.

About the situation of sales start to be reduced, it's my belief that this could happen, but that's why they keep up releasing new tools (the Mobile and Portable tools are about to be out to the public) to keep their sales running (of course), but you can also see that mostly it's ACELab that eventually release the new ways to deal with HDD problems (R&D). This will also make clients the need to pay the update fees and this creates income for them.

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http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

MRT of today is too good to stop development (unlike salvationdata HD and DC at the time) and slowly slowly really are constitute an alternative to pc3k.
And these chinese companies do only good for you @lcoughey and @pclab and all ACELAB community otherwise you had to pay for one pc3k unit 20000$ plus 50% of your monthly income protection for the rest of your life.

It would be good for the industry if there was a competitor to PC-3000. Keeping them honest and both fighting to be the best in the market always good for product development. I have both PC-3000 and MRT. IMHO the issue with MRT is they are so keep to bring out new functionality, they do not bother to fix the basics. Unless they fix the basics they will never be a competitor to Ace Labs.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Exactly this. They cannot even get the long file path thing fixed, mostly because they just don't seem to understand what we are complaining about.

When saving out data, even if you choose to just save from Root to the destination, they insist on adding the partition number in full form, the file system, the capacity of the partition, the drive family and the drive capacity followed by the folder root, which, in some cases, adds to many characters to the file paths of sub-folders. So, rather than remove the unnecessary details that we could put in a folder name ourselves, if we felt it necessary to add an extra 45 or more characters to the file path, they choose to create a folder called, "Long path files", where they throw any file that gets cut off by the long path. This is ever so helpful, as there is absolutely no way to know the folder path where those files came from and it assumes that those files would never have the same file name.



Sadly, if you are so lucky to figure out how to get it to work with the saving the damaged files to a separate folder, they also follow the same logic and don't bother saving it into that sub-folder with the full folder path. So, if two files of the same file name from different folders are damaged, they'll be saved to the "!Bad Files" folder together. Either one will be lost or possibly the filename will be modified for the second copy. But, there will be no way of knowing which file is which or which came from where.

It isn't rocket science, is it?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I think this can be done by adding one more expert engineer to the development team I'm sure all MRT users together can cover his salary in return to get stable and updated tool.

And @lcoughey try to correspond with them in short sentences so translation services will work better,you can also send short videos to explain them.

But, the discussion that followed suggests to me that tech support doesn't understand. He did say that he passed it along to the developers, but I've lost hope that they will ever fix this trivial issue.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I believe that this will be solved in the next update ...... now, it is likely that by those dates many of us are no longer here ..........

Following this theory all noname chinese brands are sub divisions of Apple, Samsung, etc...
People like to drag leaders in the mud.