Categories
In Depth

Warning For NVMe SSDs With Deleted Data

Your quick response to an SSD with data loss could now make the difference between a successful or failed data recovery. The Short Version If you have an SSD with missing or deleted data, you must power off the device as fast (and safely) as possible to retain the data. You shouldn’t power the drive…

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Categories
Hard Drive

WD My Cloud Problems

In the last few days, we’ve heard that hard drive manufacturer Western Digital have suffered a major outage with their web services. Unfortunately due to the way these NAS drives use a web service to login, it means when the web service is down, you cannot login to your own device. Nobody knows if WD…

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Categories
Hard Drive

Recover Data From Soldered SSD

In the last few years, soldered storage has gone from a strange Apple quirk, to a standard way of manufacturing laptops. There was outrage when apple first started soldering RAM and storage, but you’ll now find soldered SSDs in laptops from Microsoft, HP, Dell, and any other manufacturer you can think of. That’s not to…

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Categories
Hard Drive In Depth

Data Recovery for Burnt CCTV System

We recently completed an extremely difficult recovery from a fire damaged hard drive. The drive was stolen from an Annke CCTV system during a burglary and then set on fire. This is what we received: Despite looking like it had fallen from space, we could recognise that it was a Seagate drive. Most of the…

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Categories
Hard Drive

Seagate Desktop Drive & Barracuda Problems

The last time we posted about these drives was 2015, and we’re seeing another surge of these drives failing again. In the past week alone, we’ve seen two separate pairs of RAID mirrors (four drives total), an iMac Fusion Drive, a standalone iMac drive and an external Seagate backup drive from a PC. All failed…

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Categories
Hard Drive In Depth

Fake HDD Data Recovery

The saga of fake eBay and Amazon products continues. This latest instalment was supposedly a 1TB USB External Hard drive that had failed. The client didn’t suspect anything unusual about the drive until it failed, so sent it to us for diagnosis. When we removed the drive from the generic external case, we found a…

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Categories
In Depth

Why It’s Impossible to Give a Meaningful Time Estimate When Cloning a Failed Disk

Our data recovery process almost always begins with a copy process. Otherwise known as cloning or imaging, we attempt to copy every data block from the failed disk to another disk. With a normal disk, we can record how long it takes to copy a block, then multiply by the total number of blocks to…

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Categories
Guide

Kimsnot Extreme PRO – Fake 128GB SD Card

I assume this Kimsnot card is meant to be a fake Kingston SD card, although it appears to steal more of the visual design from a SanDisk Extreme card. This SD card was sadly used to photograph a wedding, and unsurprisingly to us, only the first 16GB of photographs are readable. The rest are lost…

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Categories
In Depth

Unknown Windows 98 Backup CDRs from 2002

We don’t often get much call to recover CDs anymore, but this recent case was interesting. We received a set of five CDRs labelled image library backup 2002. The user had no idea what software created them, and just a vague memory that they may have been burned from a Windows 98 PC. Step 1……

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Categories
Guide

File List Support

We’ve started to use an open source file listing tool, to make it easier to check though the recovered data before we send it to you. We’ll send you a zipped html file, with your job number as the filename. Something like “211111-File-List.zip“. Inside is a similarly named file ending “.html” which is a web…

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