When searching the Internet for data recovery you will find 135,000,000 pages just in Google alone. More than likely you will only look at the first couple pages of results to find what you are looking for. The actual term “Data Recovery” simply means the process by which data or files are recovered or restored from either a physical hard drive issue, or an issue having to do with the operating system or file structure.
The truth is the processes involved in recovering data are straight forward. If the hard drive has a physical problem whether the heads are stuck, caught in a seek pattern, or the motor doesn’t spin up, the hard disk must be repaired mechanically first. The tools and technology behind hard drive repair are well documented in the industry and pretty much the same at all recovery companies that actually have a clean room. The differences between data recovery companies start in the steps that follow the hard disk repair.
Data Recovery Services
Physical data recovery broken down into the simplest of explanations is to repair storage medium enough to transfer the data from the faulty media to secure media. It matters not if it is a SCSI hard drive, notebook drive, flash card, or a DVD, once the original media gives up the ones and zeros and a data recovery engineer transfers the ones and zeros onto functional, secure media, actual data recovery begins.
The next step in a physical hard drive recovery job is really the first step in a logical data recovery. I don’t want to be confusing here, but if you deleted files and emptied the recycle bin, software can recover your files. If a partition gets blown out, that is a logical data recovery problem. The point here is we often get in hard drives that have logical problems either with the operating system or with the file system. Nothing is more crucial when doing data recovery than knowing the ins and outs of a file system. That is why DTI is different than other data recovery companies! We have programmers in house that create applications on the fly, customizing them to meet the needs of individual clients.
That last statement needs more scrutiny. What does the individual client have to do with the data recovery process? Most of our competitors don’t think there is a relationship between them, but there is, and it is the single most critical part of the data recovery process!
When the data recovery tech gets media from the physical engineers, he is akin to a forensic investigator on CSI. He/She has to piece together the puzzle that is a faulty or damaged file system. The first step or attempt is to recreate the folder structure by “treeing” up the drive. In Windows for example this type of information can be recovered through the Master File Table which is similar to a relational database, kind of like a directory indexing of your data or a table of contents of your hard disk drive.
Once the tech gets the file system up, they then go through the process of checking the veracity of the clients data. The hardest file types to deal with are databases. Your Outlook or Outlook Express emails are stored in a database, so just about every job we get in has the potential to be difficult. The fact is DTI offers a data recovery guarantee, so we have to give back working files, or we simply don’t get paid!
If the file system can’t be “treed” up, the tech next has to use what is called a file carving program. This is a harvester that searches for specific file attributes. For instance extensions that are jpg would be one of the parameters for a search of digital photos. In most cases there are no file or folder names in this type of recovery. If you have ever gotten recovered data back that had no folder info , then that company used a file harvester.
The most important part of any of these equations is the customer. We need to know what was on their drive, what the files were about. An example is a college student sends in a hard drive for recovery, he has lost his thesis. We are the third company to look at the drive. We recovered it when others couldn’t, but it isn’t because we have better kung fu, we actually asked “what is it about?”. You see the Tech needed clues to build his puzzle, that is a corrupt file system. The student said, no one else asked me so many questions. Well that is why we were able to recover the data when others failed. If you have sent your drive in for recovery to another place and they failed to recover your data click here.
The fact is if you are looking for data recovery services, something very bad has happened! Give DTI the chance to work for you. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need Data Recovery.
This is a very interesting perspective! Obviously, if there is damaged to the storage media itself, in this case the platters. The data is actually no longer there. So a partial recovery of the drive would be all you could hope for.
That is true, a lot depends on where the damage is. The heads actually read from the inside out, so if the scraped ring is close to the center of the hard drive, it could mean the service area of the drive is damaged and that is bad news. http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/2007/02/10/hard-drive-recovery-service/ shows a picture of a hard drive.
Very cool article.