The Three Tiers Of Mobile Phone Data Recovery
There are 3 major ways of recovering data from a mobile phone, these range from what we call ‘Tier 1’ services which are the easiest and most straightforward processes through to ‘Tier 2’ and ‘Tier 3’ which are specialist services provided by us.
Did you know that mobile phone repair shops typically provide none of the above services? So if you’ve lost data on your mobile phone and have taken it to one of these shops to see if they could fix your phone and retrieve your data, only to be told that your your data is gone for good, please don’t give up, instead talk to us: we provide Tier 1, 2 and 3 services and can get the data back from phones in most situations.
Furthermore, we’d advise against ever taking your phone to a repair shop if you require the data off of it as it’s very common for these shops to not only fail in their attempts to recover the data, but also destroy the chances anyone else would have. Why is this? Well, put simply it’s for two reasons:
a) They don’t have the right equipment
b) They don’t know what they’re doing
Here’s a brief explanation of the tier services we provide:
Tier One: Logical/Physical – Connecting the phone to our specialist data recovery equipment via the standard (usually USB) connection that is used to charge/transfer data to and from the phone.
Tier Two: JTAG – Opening the phone up and connecting our recovery equipment directly to communication channels inside on the phones motherboard. This requires specialist jigs etc. but does not (usually) cause any damage, affect the device working afterwards, or invalidate any warranty.
Tier Three: ‘Chip-off’ – This involves dismantling the phone, de-soldering and removing the data storage components (usually chips) and attempting to read the data directly from these components. This requires specialist equipment to remove the components, read the ‘raw’ data from them and to extract the data/files from this raw data. This process is often a last resort as it is likely to mean that the phone is unusable and not repairable thereafter and will invalidate any warranty.
Links:
See Data Clinic’s mobile phone data recovery page.