International Rescue

by RulesOfTom on May 4, 2010

We recover data from hard drives for companies and individuals all over the UK, but we are receiving increasing levels of interest from overseas. In the last month, we’ve had expressions of interest from forty different countries – in each instance they were not quite satisfied with what they could find locally and were at least looking further afield.

For some, the attraction is the fact we perform the actual recovery ourselves. For some, it’s that we can swap platters as necessary (often required for dropped external hard drives ). For some it’s that we can recover data when even the manufacturer offers no solution (SC101 data recovery beyond firmware hacks for example, or reverse engineering obsoleted back-up formats). For others, it’s the fact that for every testimonial we publish, there are dozens and dozens of happy customers who ask for us not to share their identity.

We are experts in what we do. If you are reading this and are outside the UK, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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IT’s Second Oldest Profession

by RulesOfTom on March 25, 2010

Data Recovery is the IT world’s second oldest profession – but why? Almost daily, new clients express their astonishment to us that they are not the first to lose their data, that it wasn’t their fault and that an industry exists to help them get it back. But we’ve been around for a long time.

We can unwrap some of the emotions here – the reason data loss occurs is because “things break”. Data storage relies inherently on physical properties of combinations of silicon, magnetic substrate, glass, aluminium and various exotica. In a moving hard drive, you can add the extra dimension of a multi-level carousel spinning at 4000, 7000, 12000 times a minute. There’s a lot that can go wrong in there folks.

So why do manufacturers not make hard drives perfect? Because none of us are prepared to pay them to do the R&D, none of us would pay the price of the finished product, we would not accept the limitations or operating requirements and there never would be a finished product – it’s like designing a Perpetual Motion machine for a Sixth Form project – your teachers will quietly but firmly dissuade you (ok, me) from this fruitless path.

In essence, every machine is a compromise and a battle against nature. We consumers demand products are cheap, with ever-increasing feature sets, available immediately, and we tacitly accept nothing lasts forever.

When a hard drive fails (as they all will do eventually), data recovery companies like ourselves chase declining odds as we race to salvage what’s left as the hard drive makes its final descent towards its inevitable end. Sometimes it too late, but often we recover the data that far surpasses the value of the machine.

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Why Won’t Dell Recover My Data?

February 3, 2010

“Dell’s tech support is great, but they won’t recover my data! Even though the warranty’s still valid…”  We hear this refrain often. Dell computer owners come to us with inaccessible hard drive data, confused and worried.
Dell’s position is this: the hard drive itself is part of the warranty, the data is not. When you call [...]

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SC101 Data Recovery – why we do it

January 28, 2010

SC101 suddenly let you down? Need data recovery? How hard can it be, right?
If you were using an SC101 and now it’s not responding, you’ve just entered a world of pain.  These very cheap SAN (Storage Area Network) devices from the excellent Netgear look like white toasters.  You slot in two hard drives (like two [...]

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I Can’t Read The Back Up Tapes

January 22, 2010

“Our receptionist changes the back up tapes every night – we do daily and weekly back-ups.  But our main server crashed and now I can’t read the back up tapes…”.  We hear variations on this story quite often.
In the most recent example, a wee server was tucked into the corner of a successful business that [...]

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Hard Drive Platter Swap

January 19, 2010

Platter Swaps are at the top end of hard drive data recovery. This is an internal procedure to transfer almost the entire innards of a hard drive to a matching donor hard drive.  This is necessary in a few scenarios, for example when the spindle motor seizes.  We see this physical problem more and more [...]

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Avatar – This One Has the Fewest Glitches

December 18, 2009

It’s a 150 years in the future – which avatar chamber do you choose? Dr Grace (Sigourney Weaver) points the far one out to Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) – “use this one – it has the fewest glitches…”.   Some our team took in an opening night screening of James Cameron’s movie landmark Avatar 3D yesterday.  [...]

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The Ancient Library of Alexandria

December 4, 2009

Constructed by the Ptolemys in the third century B.C., this citadel of learning was the “brain and heart of the ancient world” (Sagan, Cosmos), until its final destruction seven centuries later, preceding the Dark Ages and a millenium of cultural decline and societal collapse.
The library contained upwards of half a million volumes, at a time [...]

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Click Clock

December 1, 2009

What should you do if your hard drive starts to click? Many people will ignore it as long as their computer continues to boot (even if it takes a try or two) and they can still get on with their work (even if it seems a bit slower).  But you’re dealing with a potential [...]

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Can’t See the Trees for the Wood

November 30, 2009

A keen genealogist send us a 300GB hard drive from Devon.  It contained years of research into his family tree and was totally inaccessible. Worse, when he applied power to the drive via an external USB enclosure, he realised the drive wasn’t even spinning.  He was distraught.
When we received the hard drive, we quickly [...]

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