Ask a Disaster Recovery Specialist

What would happen to your data if:

It supports your SUV on your laptop?
Your laptop, spent two days in a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of the Amazon River under water?
Saved on your computer casing drawn fire from a burning warehouse?

Data recovery specialists back the lost data in all of the above situations. Fire, flood and road rage is all in a day's work for the Knights of the byte.

Michael Peltier is theSenior Engineer for Data Recovery and Reconstruction in Tucson, Arizona. He has to tell stories and offer suggestions.

About a drive unit

But first, some background information. Drive units contain read / write heads to transfer data to the recording disks. The head flies over the platter, separated by a painfully thin cushion of air.

Measured in microns, the thickness of a human fingerprint is many times higheras the altitude of the head. If the head makes direct contact with the recording plate, the particles are cut off the head and the plate and caught up in the air cushion, where they stopped to grind the platter's Recording Media. The drive can be damaged in less than fifteen minutes, or it may take several days.

Peltier remembered the customer who "applied a few drops of oil" inside the drive enclosure, not because the engine is turning. The case has been saturated with oil and theOil prevents flying upside down. The recording surface was clean soil. "A few drops! He is a test strip was added!" Peltier said.

Then the time came, he discovered a family of ants was domiciled in a drive.

Causes of damage

However, obsolescence is the typical offender. All drives will eventually fail, but a mixed bag of conditions leading to premature drive failure - heat, water, impact, for power outages, viruses orEnvironmental pollutants.

While fire can cause heat damage, overheated equipment is the most likely cause. At an ambient temperature (ie room) is too high, the atmospheric pressure changes will reduce the air cushion thickness. The read / write head contacts the recording occurs platter and corruption.

Result in high shock or vibration similar damages.

Contamination of the environment is usually when the seal to the drive is damaged. (Not all driveshave this seal). The damaged seal, particles in the air or cigarette smoke can find their way between the head and the plate, where they can grind away the recording media.

Water damage occurs, because pollutants in the water corrosive to the metals found inside the drive, so that microscopic pitting.

Power outage also caused damage. Sudden power failure or lightning strike can lose the drive to RPMs (revolutions per minute). This leads on to the air pressure dropin turn the head flying height.

Viruses can cause the software to create chaos.

Prevention

Peltier suggests the following procedures will increase your chances of data recovery:

Backup and store your backup data locally.
Do not use the power to a damaged hard drive. Power reduces the ability to recover data.
Power down immediately, if your drive emits sanding, scraping or popping noises. Trainingto write to the media, the amount of corruption will increase, and notes or "Rosetta stone" to use the data recovery specialists to destroy your data again.
Utilities such as Scandisk and Norton Disk Doctor are useful for repairing minor problems, but when a serious problem, they decrease the likelihood that a recovery specialist to recover the data. Peltier explained that these programs sometimes incorrectly interpret the geometry."Then it sets what it thinks is available disk space for notebook operations and can end up overwriting the actual data, which is located there. That's quite upset."
Say "No" if Scandisk or another program asks if you want to try to repair damage. Windows users can discover the extent of the damage by using the command prompt and run check disk without the / f switch. "When it 4-5 errors, let the dice and Scandisk fix it. If there are hundreds orThousands, contact a data recovery professional. "
Large files are a higher risk of corruption than smaller files. If possible, separate your work into smaller files.
Never open the drive. A speck of dust can destroy hundreds of sectors, and just loosening the screws can be placed on the drive out of kilter, so that the board no longer recognizes.

Data Recovery

File Recovery can not be guaranteed, but ifConditions of consent, much can be achieved. Peltier once again 7566141f lost data from a reformatted hard drive. Deleted files can be formatted drives, or "shadow" behind the data and disaster recovery specialists can often retrieve this data.

If you ever need a data recovery specialist, Peltier suggests that you ask for a company or individual look with experience, for references, see the pricing policy in advance and look forwardfor a "no data, no charge" policy. "If someone is charged a diagnostic fee, the possibility exists that they tell you that they have the best records in the data again and again only the diagnostic fee. Without a diagnostic fee, you know, they work in your best interest. "

And oh yes, did we mention have a backup?

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