To find the hidden library folder, go to Finder and click the Go menu at the top of the screen. You will see a list of folders. Now if you press the alt / option key on your keyboard you will see the hidden library folder appear. This is only a temporary way in, and you will have to press the key again next time. The folder remains hidden the rest of the time.

If you have problems with an external drive, you can perform a relatively simple test to check where the fault lies. Be aware that opening the external drive case will probably void your warranty, and if there is crucial data on the drive you should seek professional data recovery. That’s the obligatory warning out the way, so lets have a look at some troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting tips.

• First check all cables are plugged in securely, and not damaged or frayed near the ends.. If you have an identical drive with spare cables try them, but make sure you don’t plug in a power supply with different voltage! Hard drives don’t handle extra voltage well so you’ll end up in a worse position than you started.
• If you know how, you could remove the hard drive from the external case and attach it directly to a PC to see if that allows access to the data. If it does, you should copy the data off straight away. Problems have a habit of coming along in twos and threes so don’t push your luck.
• Whatever you do, don’t dismantle the actual hard drive. Hard drives are built in controlled clean-air environments and even the smallest spec of dust can cause permanent damage to the drive.
• Since the introduction of unique ROM chips on the hard drives, it is often no longer possible to exchange circuit boards with another hard drive to access the data. In our experience circuit board problems are far less common than they used to be.

If you are looking for data recovery from an external hard drive then have a look at our external drive recovery services.

Advanced Format has been introduced to cram more data on a single platter. To do this the manufacturer has increased the standard 512 byte sector size to a whopping 4096 byte sector. This format design also incorporates better data integrity, hopefully giving the customer all round better performance.

Customers need to remember at the end of the day, electronic devices can malfunction at any time. So make sure you always backup your precious data.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) puts storage onto your network, where it can be accessed by many computers. They often have more than one hard drive which can allow you to have automated copies of your data, which is known as RAID. A common type of RAID found on NAS devices is RAID 1, which will make two hard drives into a mirror copy of one another. Some manufacturers call RAID 1 Safe mode. If you have a NAS with two 1TB hard drives and set them to RAID 1 mirroring, instead of 2TB of storage (1TB x2) you only get 1TB. Everything you store to the NAS gets saved to both drives automatically. The theory is that if one of the drives fail, you can access all of the data from the other one. In practice that is not always the case. More on that later.

RAID 1 Mirror Animation

RAID 0 (Stripe)

Another common NAS option is RAID 0. The “R” in RAID stands for redundant, however there is no redundancy in RAID 0, so it’s not a real RAID type. If you setup the same two 1TB disks as RAID 0, you will get a 2TB volume to store your data on. The problem is that every single file you write to the NAS will be split into tiny pieces and distributed across both drives. If one drive fails, you not only lose the data from that failed drive, but also from the non-failed drive as it only contains half the pieces of each file. RAID 0 should never be used for long term storage, but can be fast so is often used for video editing.

RAID 0 Stripe

So that’s the hardware taken care of. What other things should you look out for when choosing a NAS?

Another problem with most NAS devices is the non-standard filesystems they use to store the data on the disks. If the NAS itself fails, you cannot usually read the disks by attaching them to a standard PC. So even in RAID 1 mirror mode, you could end up with no usable copies of your data. Most NAS drives run a simplified version of Linux, but only some of them use standard Linux filesystems like ext2/3/4.

Backup my backup?

Some NAS drives have a USB port to allow you to backup the data to an external hard drive. This is great, as long as you can access the backup data on a regular PC, and it doesn’t need to go through the NAS. You can imagine why that would be a problem.

To summarise, NAS drives can be a great way to upgrade your home or small office storage. They can allow collaboration and sharing of files between users, and should simplify your backup process. Just remember that a NAS is a small server that needs to be backed up as a matter of urgency. As long as you have that covered then a NAS can be a smart addition to your network.

NOTE: Formatting your drive will destroy all the data. Make sure there’s nothing on there you need.

1. First attach the drive to your Mac. The Mac will notify you with a small finder window to initialise the drive. See below.

Initialize Your Drive For A Mac

2. Once you have clicked initialize you will see the Disk Utility Application window. See below.

Mac Disk Utility

3. You need to select the drive you want to format in the left hand window of the utility as highlighted in blue. Internal drives show as grey and external drives show as yellow. At this point make sure you choose the correct drive, the utility will not allow you to format the internal boot drive. See below.

Drive selected

4. Now choose the Partition Tab. See below.

Partition Tab

5. Now click on the Partition Layout drop down bar and choose the first option “1 Partition”. Also to the right under Partition Information give your drive a name and below that choose the partition type you want which will be Mac OS Extended ( journaled ). We are nearly there. You now need to click on the options tab in the bottom left of the utility window and choose GUID Partition Table and click okay. As you will read in the text information, this allows the drive to be used with all current OS X Macs. See Below.

Options Tab

7. Now all you need to do is click the apply button as shown in red below.

Apply

8. Another window will appear asking for confirmation to partition the drive. Click partition. See below.

Partition Drive

9. A formatting window with a progress bar will now appear and then disappear when done. You will now see your named drive in the left window, which means that your drive is now formatted. Close the disk utility and the hard drive is ready to use. See below.

Hard Drive Formatted

SSD Data Recovery

SSDs (Solid State Drives) may one day become the standard form of storage in computers. Apple laptops are already heading that way. There are certainly many advantages when comparing SSDs to HDDs (Hard Disk Drives), however they do bring their own problems, which are often not well reported. We don’t care how good SSDs can be. We care about how they fail. It’s common to hear things like: “I’m replacing my hard drive with an SSD so I won’t have to worry about it crashing again.” While this is technically true – there are no moving parts to crash – there are plenty of other ways an SSD can fail. Whether it’s technically crashed or not doesn’t matter at all when you can’t access your files. It’s a shame but an SSD does not get you out of the boring task of running regular backups.

There are some pros and cons which specifically affect data recovery from SSDs. I haven’t listed things like battery life or read / write speed as they are not relevant when it comes to recovering data from them.

SSD Data Recovery Pros:

• Shock resistance. No moving parts to crash.
• Just as susceptible to filesystem issues, deletion, reformatting, bad sectors etc which can be recovered using existing equipment.

SSD Cons:

• False sense of security. The word reliable comes up a lot in SSD marketing with phrases like “More reliable, faster, and more durable than traditional magnetic hard drives.” Maybe research exists that shows SSDs are less prone to failure but it doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment. Anything that holds your valuable data runs the risk of getting drenched, getting stolen, getting lost, and that’s before we even take general failures into account.
• Susceptible to electronic failure, Maybe more so than a hard drive as the storage and electronics are combined in SSDs. Some of the most common hard drive failures are caused by errors in the firmware which controls the performance of the drive. SSDs have very complex firmware, which opens the possibility of firmware corruption. In most cases firmware corruption will block access to your data.
• Encryption. Most modern SSDs encrypt the data at a hardware level, which makes it impossible to remove data chips and extract data from them externally (you can do it, but the data is encrypted). The keys to the encryption are often stored within the controller chip, so if that fails, you could be locked out of your data for good. Modern encryption works well. You can’t get round it.
• Wear-levelling algorithms. Which move the data around the SSDs to improve performance, can make recovery difficult as these algorithms would need to be taken into account when accessing a failed SSD. They don’t store data in logical order like hard drives do.

We wrote a detailed blog on the subject back in November 2011, but it still appears to trouble many customers.

We still often get the questions: ”What do I do with the recovered data once I receive it?” and “How do I get the data back into it’s original places on my Mac?” For out-of-warranty Macs, this is where our Mac Setup comes into play. For a fixed cost we will provide you with a new installed hard drive, with all your recovered data migrated into it’s original locations, so that when you receive your Macintosh computer back, hey presto! it’s as if your Mac had never failed in the first place, everything up and running as it was.

iPhone Data Recovery

When developing our iPhone data recovery process we had to make a few decisions about the devices we can support. The newer iPhones (4s +) are not accessible in the same way as older models.

With the iPhone 4 and below we can extract the data using a forensically clean process. What this means is that we can take the data off without writing anything to the NAND chips (storage) inside the iPhone. This fits in perfectly with our regular data recovery process as we never write data to a device we receive.

With the iPhone 4s, Apple changed the part of the system we use to access the iPhone’s memory. There is a chance that a new method of extraction for iPhone 4s will become available, but until it does we will not be recovering files from these devices.

Physical damage

iPhones store their data on NAND chips which are soldered to the main circuit board of the phone. The data can only be correctly decoded if we also have access to other parts of the circuit board, so it is crucial that the iPhone is electronically functional. If water damage has shorted the iPhone then we have no way to access the data externally. It’s not that it’s impossible, just that the work would be unreasonably expensive and time consuming.

Deleted Files

Another potential barrier for iPhone recovery is down to the way files are stored. Since iOS4 most files including iPhone camera photos and videos are encrypted before being written to storage, using unique encryption keys. This means every file ends up with a different header. When files are deleted there is nothing to distinguish a photograph from any other random collection of bytes.

Another problem with the file based encryption is that if you restore the iPhone using iTunes, those encryption keys get erased and new ones are generated. This prevents recovery of the old data, which is good for security but bad for data recovery.

How Hard Drives Store Data Across Multiple Heads

When required we can use a process to take the data from the drive one disc surface at a time. This can allow us to avoid using a failing head until we have the rest of the data extracted. When we have extracted all of the data the parts are rejoined to allow access the files. In some cases this is the only way to get the data back.

Hard drives do not allow access to individual disks during normal operations so we need to use specialist hardware and software.

If you have one of these hard drives that has already failed and you wish to recover your data, then please contact us.