Burned, Dropped, Drowned: HDD Recovery In Pictures

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They had 4 hours to prepare and they didnt think to take out the hard drives with "documents from over 40 schools in the Cedar Rapids School District, including newsletter layouts, student handbooks, forms, curriculum, and more."

Bad judgment
 
I went to their site and looked at the "museum" of recoveries. If you didn't know any better you think they primarily work with equipment from the 80's and 90's's and mostly Apple equipment (PowerBooks? CRT iMac's??)..... update sadly needed
 
After reading this, its quite obvious this is an advertisement for the data recovery company.
 
This is a good article. I had a Maxtor external hard drive crash once and I had data on it that I didn't have on any other drive. I still have the drive and I never reformatted it. I have since purchased two Western Digital external hard drives and back up my files immediately every time there is a change. I have heard of another data recovery software called SpinRite, so I might try it or GetDataBack at some point in the future.

I was using Streamload for internet backup and they changed their name to MediaMax. They have since gone out of business. I got an email after that offering me a deal on another service called Box.net, but didn't find it to be cost effective as I need at least 500 GB of space.

I am a home user and have 20 years experience with computers.
 
[citation][nom]tpi2007[/nom]I wonder what will happen to this and other companies' business model when in a few years SSD's start becoming the norm.Which brings another question and article suggestion: how do you do recovery of a water submerged SSD ?[/citation]

Thats the beauty of Solid State. It doesn't need air holes, its fairly solid. But yes, in a fire it'll pretty much destory SSD faster than a normal HD - IMHO. Twice I've accidnely left a USB flash key in my pants when doing the laundry. I'd find the drive in the dryer (on HOT) when done. And the key survived, actually I still use it today sometimes after 2 years since it happened. 30+ minutes in the washer, then very hot dryer, not bad.

 
A company that will support drives for tne next few years..
This makes me wonder what the solid state version for recovery will be like..
Solid state recovery will be much simpler and cheeper I expect..
 
[citation][nom]tpi2007[/nom]I wonder what will happen to this and other companies' business model when in a few years SSD's start becoming the norm.Which brings another question and article suggestion: how do you do recovery of a water submerged SSD ? Sure, there are no platters, so the only thing to care might be rust on the pcb's, contacts, etc. Is it so ? Or is there more to it ?Some people who are considering buying SSD's for certain tasks might like to know if such companies already do this kind of stuff. I visited DriveSavers and they don't refer to it explicitly. They do recover from usb flash drives or memory cards. So they should be able, right ? Or not right ?[/citation]

That was what I thought too.

But it was an interesting read, and I'm sure they can adapt their business to SSD stuff too. Thanks for the article.
 
Grate in site, thanks.
As for the question "why they had no backup in a remote location", well it is simple really. I am in IT for as long as i remember, and let me tell you something, people that didn't got burned, don't really understand how painful that really is. In small company's with no IT department, there is no one that can enforce any policy on the users. And their is the result. There are other reasons as well, such as sensitive data etc, but i don't think it is the case. One thing for sure, this company will have a remote backup solution of a kind :).
 
Very interesting to see how it is done, and indeed there is a lot more to it than expected. I also subscribe that it smells like an informercial 🙂
 
Love the part where they tell people to stop using data recovery software and carry the drives straight to them.IM sorry where im from not a alot of people spending $1700 USD to get thier data back, theyd rather write it off.If data recovery software doesnt work thats just it, they arent speding the money to send the drive up to a service that charges in excess of $100USD just to look at it and nearly two grand to fix it and then another $200 for new media,its just not happening.
 
For those wondering about SSD Recovery, anything with a multilayered board inside is subject to water and contaminant damage if it's compromised. Yes, there aren't any moving parts, but electronics and water-borne contaminants do not get along. Aside from the corrosion problems, contaminants also generate static charges, something not covered in this article. I worked in Class 100 and 10k clean rooms for years when I was a Federal Gov't QA Inspector assigned to key NASA programs. I've even done some HD recovery operation in my time before they had services like DS, where an entire system was submerged in saltwater for a couple of days, then flushed out with a firehose.

Multilayer boards, when submerged in water, will soften unless it is completely covered in a thick layer of conformal coating. Water gets into everything, even circuit IC's. Even if the board doesn't come apart, if water gets into an SSD, eventually rust and contamination will compromise the drive. The problem with any contaminants is that depending on the type of contaminant, it can alter the drive's read/write ability since they're all magnetic.

DriveSavers has several good recovery programs they recommend, but realistically they are a last resort company, when the drive has physically failed, or in this case it is severely damaged from elements. Of course in the end, it depends on how much the data is worth to you.

For those who save their data off site, that's great, but I don't trust anyone with my data. If you do, then you're more trusting than most. I guess I've been in the business too many years to trust anyone with critical data. I don't even use public sites or public email services like Yahoo or Gmail. Using an offsite storage service isn't even a consideration - it's too tempting for people today to sell data, especially if it's e-commerce related. Some e-commerce laws specifically tell operators that personal data must be kept under their control at all times, meaning they can't store it offsite unless it's at a company division that belongs to them. For one of my clients, they maintain all personal and financial data onsite, and offline, where all ecommerce is completed online and data not kept onsite is purged from the online server after the transaction.

You're right - DS isn't cheap. But there isn't much they can't recover, and if you really need it, they're worth it. One thing not mentioned in this article is that they also have a special Media Division, which specializes in the recovery of Audio, Video and static picture files from drives. They have helped many movie and tv studios, actors, musicians and many others from disaster. One of their more famous cases is the Simpsons, where they recovered several episodes from a damaged drive.

If you're wondering - yes, I'm a DS Reseller Agent. But I wouldn't be if I didn't think they were worth the service they provide. Working long hours in a 10k clean room isn't fun.
 
I work in Cedar Rapids and lived through the flood. I work for a company that is on the opposite side of the river from the Cedar Rapids School District Building. We also had over 7 feet of water on our 1st floor.

Yes pulling the hard drives could have saved some heartache and money. But let me give you some additional information before you start judging someone else’s performance. Many of the people in the city were out for many, many hours either sandbagging or helping family and friends relocate out of the mandatory evacuation areas. So priorities in the 4 short hours only allow a few of the many tasks that should be done to be accomplished. The swiftly rising river cut off many of the main transportation arteries across the city preventing accessibility to many areas. The level that the water rose to was totally unexpected, projections were that the river would crest at 21 feet but it was actually 32 feet and the surge which overwhelmed the downtown and many neighborhoods occurred in the middle of the night.

Our company had 5 locations flooded and lost many employee personal computers and an incredible amount of other assets. Our employees are encouraged to keep all company data on the servers which are backed up and replicated to other company locations but getting 5000 employees to follow this policy is sometimes a challenge. An attempt was made to salvage data on some hard drives which were assumed to be a total loss since it couldn't hurt. The pc hd's that were recovered and identified as containing important data were soaked in 90% isopropyl alcohol and cleaned as best they could be without disassembling them. After drying, they were then placed in a sacrificial machine and if viable immediately imaged. Amazingly enough some drives were viable and the data recovered.

My hats off to DriveSavers for helping the CR School District Print Shop. The city has come a long way but it still is recovering.
 
This reads like a paid infomercial. Tom's stock just dropped in MY book.
 
[citation][nom]Bernoulli[/nom]This reads like a paid infomercial. Tom's stock just dropped in MY book.[/citation]

Well, it wasn't =) Thanks for the feedback!
 
I really can't fathom why you were too timid to inquire as to how much the procedure in this case study cost.
That information would have made a mildly interesting article, as painful as slideshows are to step through, at least relevant.
 
[citation][nom]slashkeyscion[/nom]All they had to do was remove the hard drives and put them in a sealed watertight bag. Blatantly obvious.[/citation]
All they really had to do is prepare for something like this in advance. It's not like the river has never flooded before. You would think a school would hire smart people!
 
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