• “100% successful. Well done”

    Ross Lindsay Cumbernauld

  • “A company that clearly knows exactly what it is doing, delivers exactly what it promises and does so without any fuss, just excellent service.”

    Howard Wilson Bristol

  • “Over the moon with the service, and the fact that I have all my data back is an absolute lifesaver.”

    John McNiff Pontefract

  • “You expect efficiency as standard and once you've got it, you realise that friendliness is extremely important too. Tierra does really well in both areas.”

    Daniel Batista Millares London

  • “Definitely worthwhile using your services to get back what everyone else was telling me was lost! Those photos and accounts are priceless.”

    Paul Edwards Liverpool

  • "I found Tierra to be clear, concise, straight forward, friendly, extremely professional, competent and highly knowledgeable."

    Callum Donez North East Lincolnshire

  • "Tierra salvaged my backup, with persistence that I can't have imagined."

    Gordon Dodds Cornwall

  • "Tierra stepped in quickly, efficiently and professionally restored all my lost data. Outstanding quick service."

    Jonathan Crombie Crombies of Edinburgh

  • "The level of customer service I experienced from your company was very impressive."

    Diane J Earle London

  • "This company truly understands the concept of time-critical recovery."

    Professor Ben Kneller University of Aberdeen

  • "Thank you for your professionalism, speed and quality of work."

    Anna Mavrogianni London

  • "No hesitation in recommending your company to anyone."

    Phil Codd Doncaster

  • “Thank you again for doing what the first computer repair shop I visited told me was basically not possible.”

    Kenny McLeish Carluke

  • “Tierra rocks!”

    Stephan Ringer London

The Persistence of Data

by RulesOfTom

Lost data may still be recoverable, long after you’ve given up on it.

We had a call asking if we could look at a hard drive that was 10 years old -

Data is less fragile than you think

it had crashed a year ago and been left in a drawer.  In most instances, age makes a hard drive less stable to deal with.  We like to have a hard drive as soon as possible following a crash.  All the data was successfuly recovered, but it was touch and go.  Interestingly, some internal hard rubber components had decayed with time and were the consistency of freshly made toffee.  The platters were fine, the read-head stack needed to be replaced.

On another occasion, a customer had deleted an important Word document by mistake and asked if we could recover it.  This can be easy, if the PC has not been used since the deletion.  But the customer had continued to use the PC for several weeks afterwards!  The result was that Windows overwrote some of the original document (now marked as free space), and document recovery difficulty went from trivial to desperately hard.  We eventually pieced together the vast majority of the contents manually from the raw hex (and saved the customer dozens of hours of repeat work).

Moral of the tale: act quickly after a hard drive crash to maximise your chances of recovery.

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