What It Is and How To Find an Expert

September 3rd, 2010

Your data is important. Losing it, whether it is a million row database or just your music collection, sucks. Fortunately there are companies that specialize in getting data from corrupted and broken hard drives, thumb drives and other file storage techniques.

There are many different reasons for a storage device failure. On a hard drive, the reading heads(small arms that stick out over the magnetic platter and reads the data stored on it) could contact the platter, shattering the heads and damaging the platter. If you have damaged the circuit board on the inside of your thumb drive, it is still possible the data remains as long as the chips that store the data are still intact. If you are lucky, then the damage may not be physical at all. You may have just lost your partition on the hard drive, or accidentally deleted files. The good news with cases where the damage is not physical is that it is easier to recover the data.

Data recovery experts know how to get the data off of corrupted or damaged devices. While there is no guarantee that the data on your storage device is recoverable, a data recovery expert generally is able to extract some information. For a hard drive, this generally means transplanting the magnetic disk to a specialized device capable of reading the platter just like the heads could. For the thumb drive, the chips that store the data are desoldered from the broken circuit board and attached to a specialized reader. If the problem is purely software, then data recovery experts can use specialized software to check the integrity of the data.

To find a data recovery specialist who can handle your case, you need to know what type of device your data was stored on. There are specialized experts that focus on hard drives, CD and DVDs, tape drives, RAID arrays and more. Of course there are general purpose shops that have a data recovery expert who can handle many different types. Keep in mind that you will probably want to find a data recovery specialist that is nearby. Your hardware is already damaged, it is probably a bad idea to send it through the trauma of the mail. Usually a simple Google search is sufficient to find a nearby shop capable of handling your problem.

Data loss sucks, but it is easier to recover it now than ever before. Data recovery experts know how to recover information off of pretty much any storage medium. All you need to do to find one capable of solving your problem is to perform a search. Fairly large cities usually have a local shop capable of handling your needs. Ask around; see if anyone you know can recommend a good specialist. Who knows, you may get that database back yet.

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What to do in case of a drive emergency

June 8th, 2010

In the event of problems with a hard drive, you are always flirting with data loss. Here are a few simple rules to determine what your next step should be:

Scenario 1: You hear a drive making unusual clicking and/or grinding noises.
Steps to take: Stop using the drive immediately. Whenever a drive produces these kinds of sounds, you’re risking that the heads are scraping over the platters (called “scoring”) which will make it impossible to read any data off the drive. Call the Data Rescue Center immediately!

Scenario 2: A drive is no longer recognized by the computer and doesn’t show up on the computer at all or only very intermittently. The motor inside the drive is spinning, however, and does not produce and unusual sounds.
Steps to take: Very likely a failure of the drive’s electronics, however the data can usually be fully recovered. Any drive that does not show up at all on a computer despite seemingly working fine can typically not be recovered by the user. Please call the Data Rescue Center for a free evaluation of the drive.

Scenario 3: A drive is showing unreliable behavior. It occasionally seems to freeze when accessing data, but does get recognized properly by the computer.
Steps to take: In a situation where a drive shows some inexplicable, seemingly random behavior, this points to the drive having many bad blocks or a weakness of one or more of the read/write heads. You should copy important data off this drive ASAP and replace the drive.

Scenario 4: Data has been accidentally deleted from the drive, or the drive has been formatted or partitioned by mistake, causing data stored previously on this drive to be gone.
Steps to take: Do not write any new data to this drive, as this will make a full recovery impossible. All these actions mentioned have so far only affected the Table Of Contents on the drive, the actual data is still there and can be recovered with a software package like Data Rescue. By not allowing any new data being written to the drive you prevent that your old data is being overwritten and gone for good, because once new data is written over your data, it can never be brought back.

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How to avoid the need for data recovery

June 2nd, 2010

Talking about how to avoid the need for data recovery seems contradictory to the mission of a data recovery company like the Data Rescue Center. However, we’re not really giving away any trade secrets, just disseminating a little bit of common sense.

There are two main factors that drive the need for data recovery services: data loss through either accidental actions like deleting files or formatting/partitioning drives, or failed hardware, i.e. failure of the drive itself. And the second factor is the lack of backups.

We don’t expect the first factor to change anytime soon. Let’s face it, we all make mistakes, and emptying the trash can that contained important files is easily done. Also, any hard disk will ultimately die, some sooner, some later, but drive failure is inevitable.

This leaves us with the second major factor: backups. If you have working backups, whatever the reason for your data loss, you can go to your backups and just restore those files you mistakenly deleted, or if the whole drive failed you just get a new one (which will probably cost you less and provide you with a lot more storage space) and write the backup onto said new drive.

Sure, it will cost you some time and effort, as well as potentially the price for a new drive, but nothing that compares to the peace of mind of having working backups and being able to access them when necessary.

Sadly, most people still don’t have a backup solution in place, despite the fact that with today’s choices and prices for storage, it really is a no-brainer. Remember, you don’t really care about the drive itself, only about the data on it. That’s why a failed drive that is still under warranty will be replaced by the manufacturer; the data on it, however, is not. The only way to get your data back at that point is data recovery, and it typically costs more than it would have cost to just get that external hard drive you always intended to get to begin with.

So if you haven’t yet set up backups of your irreplaceable photos, movies, music, and work documents, do it ASAP! One day you’ll be glad you did.

Posted in Data Recovery, Hard Drives, Technology | 2 Comments »

Next jump in drive storage announced

May 19th, 2010

Seagate just announced their first 3TB drive for release later this year. However, in order to be able to use the whole space on the drive, a couple of hardware and software upgrades will have to happen, as the currently used MBR (Master Boot Record) on PCs can only address up to 2TB of data.

The replacement will be the GPT (GUID Partition Table), which is supported by newer versions of Windows, as well as Mac OS X and Linux. Most notably Windows XP does not support it. To make matters worse, most motherboards with a regular BIOS cannot boot from a drive partitioned with GPT, so that new boards that support EFI firmware may be necessary. This “Extensible Firmware Interface” as defined by Intel is, however, a rarity in today’s marketplace. The most notable PC manufacturer of EFI machines is… Apple.

Of course, it is probably safe to say that there will be plenty of bugs found in various BIOSes, drivers, and storage device firmwares, so being an early adopter of any drives with a capacity in excess of 2TB will be an adventure, to say the least. Fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

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Data Storage Technology Trends

May 7th, 2010

We’re nearly half way through 2010 (I know, scary, isn’t it?), and it is time to review where technology is heading in the storage arena. Of course, the general trends that are always there continue: storage capacity on hard drives keeps growing, and prices keep falling. It is now possible to buy a 750GB hard drive for your notebook. Wow! Also, 2TB hard drives are slowly but surely approaching the $100 mark, another milestone!

But we also have some new and updated technologies coming our way that affects data storage. Let’s start with USB 3.0. Backwards compatible with USB 2.0, USB 3.0 will allow for much faster data transfer rates than have been possible before, up to 5gps, or 10 times the speed of USB 2.0. For more information, like what the connectors look like and more about the specs, have a look here.

So USB 3.0 will speed up your external hard disks? What about a speed increase inside your computer? That is happening right now as well, courtesy SATA III. SATA is the protocol and interface that is used to talk to your hard drives inside your desktop or laptop, typically the second generation, or SATA II. That protocol can reach up to 3Gbps. Now with the third generation, conveniently named SATA III, those speeds can be doubled to a theoretical limit of 6Gbps.

Note that basically no hard drive on the market today is fast enough to saturate SATA II (with a few minor exceptions), let alone SATA III. However, where we are going to see these kinds of speeds is Solid State Drives, or SSDs. These devices consist internally of flash memory chips and don’t contain any moving parts, unlike traditional hard drives, which spin their platters typically with speeds of 5,200 to 10,000 rpm. Because of the much faster access speeds, SSDs have much better access times, and fragmentation isn’t a problem as it is with regular hard drives either. However, it’s a young technology and as such prices are still very high and with a few teething troubles, but as with all things high tech, they will come down in price, sooner rather than later.

So if you’re looking for a new computer or planning to build one yourself, and have a need to do a lot of data transfers, internally or externally, it would probably be a good idea to look out for USB 3.0 functionality, built-in or as an add-on, and keep an eye out for SATA III storage controllers and drives. Whatever solution you’re looking at, though, make sure that it fully supports the speeds you’re looking to get. Just because a board or system advertises USB 3.0 ,doesn’t mean you’ll get the full speed out of it, so buyer beware!

And finally, a little bit of science fiction: Intel is working on optical interconnect technology called Light Peak that will start with a bandwidth of 10Gbps and only go up from there!

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Monitoring your drives just got a little easier

April 21st, 2010

With the release of Drive Genius 3 on the Mac, a new feature was added that makes monitoring your drives a lot easier: DrivePulse®! Using DrivePulse®, whenever the system is inactive for a period of time, it will check your drives for potential problems, making use of the S.M.A.R.T. technology in today’s drives (S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), as well as fragmentation status, temperature, and other items.

While this monitoring will not necessarily alert you exactly when your drive is about to fail (something that isn’t really possible anyway, just like predicting volcano eruptions or earthquakes: you know it will happen, but can’t be sure when), it gives you some good indicators about the health of the drive and when it might me a good idea for a backup.

If you have a Mac and are looking for a universal drive utility, check out the brand new Drive Genius 3.

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Data Recovery on an iPhone? Is it possible?

April 15th, 2010

If you lost data on an iPhone, i.e. you deleted pictures by mistake that you didn’t sync yet with your computer, can those pictures be recovered? The answer is a clear “it depends”.

As the iPhone (and consequently the iPod Touch and now also the new iPad) are part of Apple’s closed ecosystem, you as the user don’t have full access to the file system and – more importantly – cannot read or write directly to the flash memory where all your information is stored. In addition, any app on your iPhone is “sandboxed” and doesn’t have full access to the file system, let alone direct flash memory access, and thus cannot check for your deleted data, which is why there cannot be a tool like Data Rescue (which we offer for the Mac or PC) on the iPhone.

What happens when you delete information on your iPhone (similar to a regular hard drive), the entry in the file system is removed and the part on the flash memory that holds the actual information is added to the pool of free space, ready to be overwritten again by any kind of data. So even normal use, for example if you browse the web on your iPhone with Safari, the temporary files that get generated could already irrevocably overwrite the data you would like to get back.

Does that mean no data recovery is possible on iPhones? If you have the iPhone 3GS with the latest software installed, sadly, there is currently no known way to recover that data. If you’re using an older iPhone or haven’t updated your 3GS to the latest software, it may be possible to perform a function called “jailbreaking”, which would allow us to install certain software that in turn gives us direct access to the flash memory, and thus potentially recover the data you are after.

Realistically, however, the chances of actually finding your deleted data is fairly slim, especially if your device is more or less full with your data (music, videos, photos), as the chances of your lost data not being overwritten through normal operation tend to become zero quite quickly.

As a rule of thumb (just like for any other data loss scenario): if you have deleted data on your iDevice that had not been backed up, stop using it immediately and give us a call, so we can assess the situation and review your options.

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The 4K Sector Transition

April 15th, 2010

A change is coming into the hard drive market place this year, after planning has been going on for about a decade or so. The change in question? Raising the size of hard drive sectors from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes, or 4KB. Why is this important, and why should you care?

First some background about what’s going on: the main reason for raising the amount of data a single sector can hold is to improve efficiency (and therefore speed), as well as support for even larger hard drives. You see, the storage capacity of hard drives has increased immensely year over year, but the way the data is organized on the platters has not kept pace. And there are good reasons why the organizational side hasn’t changed the same way, even though the manufacturers were aware that they would be running into issues eventually and needed to do something about it.

The problem with smaller sector sizes that basically every hard drive up to 2010 used is that they are increasingly inefficient. The data stored on hard disks isn’t just your actual data, but also overhead that enables important functionality like error correction, without which you couldn’t rely on your data being stored correctly. Going from 512 byte sectors to 4KB sectors allows better and more efficient error correction algorithms to be used, which will result in higher speeds, but also increases capacity of the drives, as more of the drive space can be used for user data, and less for error correction.

Now this all sounds very good and reasonable, but what’s the catch? As alluded to, some older OSes and applications cannot properly deal with these new 4K sector drives, the most popular one being Windows XP. So if you haven’t upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 7 yet, you might want to avoid getting one of these new drives (Macintosh users running Tiger or higher are not affected). You can find some helpful general information from Western Digital about these new drives, or if you would like to get the nitty-gritty technical background, head on over to AnandTech.

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Of internal and external drives

March 11th, 2010

As a data recovery company, our data recovery experts get to see a lot of drives on a daily basis, and there are hundreds of models out there. Here are a couple of key aspects that help categorize drives.

One obvious factor is the physical size of the drive. While other sizes exist, we are typically seeing desktop drives (3.5”) and laptop drives (2.5”). Desktop drives can currently hold up to 2TB in capacity, while laptop drives have just reached the 1TB barrier.

The second big aspect is whether it is an internal or an external hard drive. A lot of people don’t realize that an external hard drive is in fact just a housing, a case for an internal hard drive, equipped with interfaces like USB or FireWire to be able to connect the drive to a computer externally.

Here it is important to know that the makers of external drives are not necessarily the makers of the actual drive mechanism inside. What this means is that unless you’re buying an external drive from one of the big drive manufacturers (i.e. Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, or Western Digital), the actual hard drive inside is not actually from the maker of the case (e.g. LaCie, SimpleTech or G-Data to name but a few), but typically from one of the big four mentioned above.

This is important in a harddrive recovery scenario, as the problem is in most cases not with the enclosure, but with the drive mechanism inside. As such, if a problematic external drive comes to us, we will have to remove it from the enclosure, in order to be able to test the actual hard drive. Unfortunately, most external drives made by the drives manufacturers themselves nowadays come in cases that cannot be opened without leaving marks or even rendering them useless after opening.

Finally, the last major point of distinction that needs to be mentioned is the interface used by the drives. For the last few years, basically all new drives shipped with the SATA (serial ATA) connector. If a drive is older than that, chances are it is still sporting the PATA (parallel ATA, also known as IDE) connector. While the SATA connector is the same on both 2.5” and 3.5” drives, laptop drives carry a smaller variant of the IDE connector compared to their desktop cousins, which means an adapter may be necessary to connect them internally to a desktop computer.

If you have an empty enclosure or want to replace a drive in an enclosure you own, it is therefore important to know which interface the case supports, as it will only support one of the two. If your case supports the IDE interface but you buy a SATA drive, you will not be able to mount the drive in your case and will have to get a different case (one that supports SATA) instead, and vice versa.

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Seagate Firmware troubles still out there

March 9th, 2010

When Seagate’s Barracuda series 7200.11 was first released, the firmware had a bug that could render your drive inoperable. Any time the drive went to sleep or the computer was shut off, there was a chance that the drive would not get back to a “ready state” and properly accept commands. At that point there is no way to get to your data without specialized tools.

As data recovery experts we still get requests about these drives and to help recover the data. This means that if you have one of these Seagate drives, take the time to check that you have the latest firmware on them, so that you don’t get hit by a non-responsive drive. Unless of course you like having to hand your precious data over to a data recovery specialist to get access to your data back.

Check our little info page with more information about the latest Seagate firmwares.

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