Data Recovery Blog - August 2011

This customer sent us an external NAS (Network Attached Storage) device from a Mac

Hi Andy and Chris,

I just wanted to say a big thank you for the work completed. The replacement USB drive (which was received very quickly) has ALL the missing data, and we have been able to successfully mount the drive, copy and backup all that was required. This is a huge relief, considering the important nature of the data.

Quite why the original backup of the data to our NAS failed is still a mystery. I suspect that there was already corruption of the disk prior to the first backup. This would explain why there was an 'interesting but apparently random' subset of the data on the NAS.

I would very much appreciate it if you could pass on my thanks to Zoe for her assistance, and in particular to Ross Burrows who handled my original call (I particularly enjoyed the 'those were the days' IT discussion).

This is the first time I have ever needed a data recovery service, having previously always been able to rely on a backup strategy (both personally and professionally). Whilst it is my hope that I never end up in a similar situation, I would not hesitate to use your services again. Equally, I would not hesitate to recommend your services to both personal and professional contacts.

Thanks again for your help and an excellent service,

With kind regards,

Richard

This customer sent us a 1.5TB Seagate external hard drive.

Dear Andy,

I haven't a chance yet to say thank you!

An excellent service - many thanks to you and your team.

Chris Francis

Data recovery from hardware encrypted hard drives

WD MyBook Essential external hard drives come with 256-bit hardware encryption. Data is encrypted and decrypted on the fly as it is written to and read from the disk. Using a special piece of hardware we are able to recover data from these drives in a unencrypted form.

Our hardware allows successful recovery even if the original encryption hardware is damaged.

Imaging is an extremely important part of data recovery. Why is this ?

Well, more often than not hard drives that come into us to have their data recovered are in a bad way - they may be external hard drives that have taken a tumble and are no longer recognised, or they may be laptop drives where the laptop has had something spilt over it, or it may be an old desktop computer that contains a hard drive that is years old that has worked day-in day-out, and now works no longer.

When drives are in this condition they are very fragile, using standard software (this includes data recovery software) on them is not a good idea as it places too much stress on the drive and can often cause data that should be recovered to become unrecoverable. That's why it's necessary to image these fragile hard drives.

Imaging is best done using hardware as unlike software, hardware has much more control at a much lower level than software. Decent imaging hardware will stress the drive as little as possible whilst imaging as much of the drive in as shorter period of time as the drive will allow. Once the data has been imaged to a drive that is functioning correctly, it then becomes easier to continue with the data recovery process as the required data is now on a stable media rather than media that is damaged and not performing consistently.

Data Recovery From External Hard Drives - Symptoms and Solutions is an easy to understand article we've written that discusses the common types of failure often encountered on External Hard Drives.
The article then goes on to describe the problems behind the failure symptoms and recommends various courses of action that can be taken in order to recover the data.

Note: You can use this article as a reference material, but please credit us and link back to our site homepage (http://www.dataclinic.co.uk)

http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Recovery-From-External-Hard-Drives---Symptoms-and-Solutions&id=6452255