IT’s Second Oldest Profession

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.