Data Recovery

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It would be hard to believe that every technology fan on the planet hadn’t already heard the news, that Apple Computer introduced its new 3GS series of iPhones last month. Here at DriveSavers, we’re celebrating the introduction of Apple’s new iPhones and reflecting on our past successes.
 
As many of our partners are aware, DriveSavers was the first company to recover iPhone data, and the jobs we’ve received have been challenging to say the least. Nearly every iPhone we’ve worked on suffered some kind of physical damage. Some ended up being waterlogged when they were dropped in lakes, ponds and toilets. Others met their fate as they literally “hit the pavement”.
 
To date, our most spectacular save was the iPhone that was intentionally dropped 26 stories down a garbage chute in a New York City apartment building, by an angry wife. With the odds stacked against us, we completed a full recovery of the critical data - in this case, they were photos needed by the disgruntled woman’s spouse.
 
Today, DriveSavers is celebrating its continued success recovering data using a myriad of new techniques we’ve developed along the way, streamlining the process with increased capabilities, recovering not only the most common kinds of important data: photos, notes and contacts, but even deleted text messages!
 
Mike Cobb, Director of Mac and UNIX Engineering summed things up, “When it comes to iPhone data recovery, our capabilities are unmatched.”

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It is very easy to forget how long we can all spend working on an important university or business document or PowerPoint presentation, if you were to add it all up it could amount to days and on occasions weeks but what do you do when you suddenly find the file has simply vanished from your computer.

The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard  drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

But oh if life was so simple!

Technorati Tags: Data Recovery, Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Recovery

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More and more enthusiast users encounter the destroyed RAID arrays. Generally, data recovery from such a RAID array is possible, but keep in mind that the effort increases disproportionately.

First of all, data has to be copied from a RAID drive onto a server, and the data set has to be put back together. The distribution of data into smaller blocks across one or more drives makes RAID 0 the worst possible type to recover. Increasing performance doesn’t necessarily do your data any good here! If a drive is completely defective, only small files, which ended up on only one of the RAID drives (despite the RAID stripe set), can be recovered (at 64 kB stripe size or smaller).  RAID 5 offers parity data, which can be used for recovery as well.

RAID data configuration is almost always proprietary, since all RAID manufacturers set up the internals of their arrays in different ways. However, they do not disclose this information, so recovering from a RAID array failure requires years of experience.

Where does one find parity bits of a RAID 5, before or after the payload? Will the arrangement of data and parity stay the same or will it cycle? This knowledge is what you are paying for.

Instead of accessing drives on a controller level, the file system level (most likely NTFS) is used, as logical drives will provide the basis for working on a RAID image. This allows the recovery specialist to put together bits and bytes after a successful recovery using special software.

The recovery of known data formats is an important approach in order to reach towards a complete data recovery. Take a JPEG file for example - will you be able to recognize a picture after recovery? Or will you be able to open Word.exe, which is found on almost every office system? The selected file should be as large as possible, so it was distributed across all drives and you can know for sure that its recovery was successful.

Two dead hard drives in a RAID 5 are more likely to be restored than two single platters, since RAID still provides parity data.

Technorati Tags: Data Recovery, Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Recovery

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