Burned, Dropped, Drowned: HDD Recovery In Pictures
Burned, Dropped, Drowned: HDD Recovery In Pictures
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Mud-Caked Drives Yield Water, Dirt, And Data
On June 12, 2008, Cedar Rapids School District Print Shop was given four short hours to prepare for the impending flood of water heading in their direction. With the deadline looming, shop supervisor Robin Rieke was instructed to “put anything of value on top of furniture that was at least three feet off the floor and evacuate everyone from the building.” For extra safety, she placed all the shop’s computers on surfaces five feet and above.
Surely you can already guess what happens next.
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I run a small it business and we offer a remote backup system which is ten replicated again so the data is moved to a third location. The third location is 150 miles from our area of operations (so a larger area disasters like floding means we won't take out more than 2 data locations).
That said I have used recovery experts in the past and they are near magicans. The clean room stuff is amazing. Still I guess disk technology has improved since the days of 8" winchesters...
Nice article - thanks
We're a company with storage in 4 different towns and a center on the top of a hill. The two towns futhest apart are about 80km from each other. In the two big locations data is backed up locally and then the backup medium are locked in a firesafe box. Wouldn't prevent damage from being submerged for a longer duration, but in almost all other cases would prevent loss of data. In the two smallest locations we've opted for backup via internet. And I think that's actually reasonably cheap. The company providing this service to us has huge datacenters in two cities that are a big bit apart (for our standards), and it's relatively cheap. You pay for the amount of data you backup - and it's using ibm's tivoli system, so it'll keep working till the end of the internet. IMO any smaller company would appreaciate this kind of backup. It doesn't cost much, and not only your current data, but also the 5 most recent revisions are stored (changable by the customer). All in all it's a brilliant solution for companies that don't want to spend huge amounts on inhouse backup and maintainance thereof.
The clean rooms are normally used for dust sensative technologies like CPUs, GPUs and the such.
The first clean room I ever saw was a tour of Intels Chandler FAB. Quite amazing to see a room where no dust can get in.
I've got to comment, even though my shop partners with DriveSavers, this whole thing kind of seemed like an ad for driver savers. It makes me wonder if Tom's accepted any money for this article. Can the author please comment?
Besides that, they are a good company, but 90% of cases can be solved by either a PCB swap or using something like GetDataBack for much cheaper.
Maybe at the time they did not have enough time, effort or money for a backup system. It is extremely recommended but you will always get people who won't or cannot do it. Very good point though
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 ?
It will be a harder process I would imagine but they will find a procedure but it will take more time and will most probably be harder.
As for data recovery, if you don't have backups then you pay the price. I couldn't believe that the print shop didn't take the computers elsewhere. If you have time to put them on top of tall furniture then you have time to put them in the trunk of your car and take them elsewhere. Or at least bag them in heavy plastic bags.
Because not every company is prone to sending their valuable data over internet, or even connecting their network to the internet, left open for hackers, trojans or virusses.
Staying offline with company sensitive data is the securest!
Also, if you get to know 2 hours in advance to start backing up a 20-100 computer company over a network, you probably can imagine that would be too late.
But I do agree, they should have backed everything up on a local server using daily or weekly incremental backups (take less space and time to backup)so in case of a flood they could back up, and take the server with them, and get out of there.
Nope, in fact, I asked to help with the story myself. I'd never seen what went on in a drive recovery and used their people/facilities as the "example."