Data Recovery Blog - November 2011

Twelve Top Tips on choosing a reputable data recovery company

Data Clinic have been a Ltd company since 2002, we were the UK's third data recovery company back then.

Now, almost 10 years later there are more companies out there that claim to perform data recovery than I've had hot dinners. The problem is though that often all you have got to go on is how the company comes across in it's web site. And, if they've got an impressive web site, you are more likely to assume that they're pretty good at data recovery also right?

This is not the case. We've been going since 2002 for a reason, and that reason is because we're good a what we do.

Here's an article about how to choose a reputable data recovery company

Not all data recovery companies are the same - Why you should always ask for a second opinion

A quick Google search for "data recovery" will produce a long list of DR companies all offering recovery services at varying prices. So how can a potential customer decide which company to choose? Low prices are certainly tempting, yet in an industry that demands a high level of technical expertise, is cheapest really the best choice? How much effort is a low-end DR company going to put into recovering your precious data, particularly if you have a badly damaged device requiring a complex recovery process and the company have offered a "no fix, no fee" deal?

Every week at Data Clinic we recover data from drives that have been to other companies who have dismissed the drives as "unrecoverable" simply because either it is not financially worth their while to attempt to recover the data or they do not have the necessary technical capability to achieve a successful recovery. We have had one such instance this week. One of our customers had lost their company data from their raid array. She contacted a localIT specialist only to be told that recovering the data was impossible. Luckily, she refused to accept their evaluation and asked Data Clinic for a second opinion on the array. We completed a diagnosis and discovered that it was, in fact, possible to recover all of the data. The data was fully restored and returned to the customer.

And the moral of the story? If you have doubts about what you have been told by a DR company, always ask for a second opinion from Data Clinic.

Fire Damage

There are fires, and then there are FIRES.

Last month we recovered the data from a fire damaged hard drive for Greater Manchester Police that was part of a murder investigation. It seems the fire was an attempt to destroy evidence, fortunately the evidence we recovered from the hard drive means the investigation can proceed. We used our Advanced Data Recovery service to successfully recover the data from this drive.

However, that's not the case with the example to the left.

Click on the top picture and you'll see a computer tower taken from the remains of a gutted warehouse. As you can see, nearly all the cabling has burnt away and all that remains are the metal chassis parts.

The bottom picture (also clickable) is a close up of the hard drive from the same computer. We've removed the top lid so you can see inside the disk. The circular disks in the middle of the picture are the disk's platter surfaces - these are the parts of the hard drive where your data is stored. To the left of the platter is an emptyish space. What is usually located here are the disk's read / write heads - the parts of the drive that write data to and read data from the platter surfaces. As you can see in this case, they've more or less melted.

It is not possible to recover any data from hard disks in this condition.