Dataquest

Data Recovery You Can Trust

Category: Misc

Posts either without a category or with uncategorisable content

  • COVID-19 Update

    Things have changed quite a bit since the start of the week, so here is an update.

    We are still working and don’t plan to stop. Our work is always solitary and doesn’t depend on many outside factors. Some deliveries are taking extra time to reach us, and some online stores are struggling to keep up with orders as more shops have closed. Most of these things are solved by waiting a little longer, so we hope you can bear with us, especially if we’re waiting for deliveries.

    As long as we can still receive drives to recover, we’ll keep recovering them. If you need data recovery and want to know how the service is affected, please get in touch. E-mail is still the best way to contact us at the moment.

    ***

    Previous Update From 20-3-2020

    We’re already working from home, so we don’t expect any major disruption to our service. Even under lockdown, we’ll still be able to continue working on your recoveries. For everyone’s benefit we’re already asking people to drop parcels at the door instead of coming in. As a precaution we’re wiping down anything that comes in to our workshop, and anything that leaves us.

    We’d really appreciate it if you call or e-mail before you turn up at our door.

    Our thoughts are with everyone currently affected by the virus. Keep calm, wash your hands, and stay up to date with the official news (ie. Don’t get your news from Facebook!).

    gov.uk
    bbc.co.uk

    We’ll update this post if anything changes.

    Dan & John

  • ATP 259: I Hired Myself

    ATP – 259: I Hired Myself ?

    TL;DR/L – Storage is hard. Move your data with you. Make redundant copies. Don’t trust manufacturer-quoted lifespans.

    In this week’s Ask ATP, the guys got a question about long-term data storage. As my accidental pet subject, I always pay close attention to storage-related chat. Fortunately whenever our hosts talk about storage it’s from a thoughtful & sufficiently cautious point of view. They know that storage is unsafe, and then plan ways round it. After hearing their countless conversations about Synology & Backblaze I know I can always trust ATP on this topic.

    I don’t have much to add to the discussion here. They covered the important stuff. If you’ve not listened already, it’s well worth your time. Also, before talking about data storage, there was some interesting discussion about Raspberry Pi , which is always cool.

  • Broken USB Stick

    Broken USB Stick

    I had a call on Friday from a very distraught lady who had dropped her laptop with her USB stick still plugged in. Unfortunately the USB stick took the brunt of the impact and all her work was no longer accessible. She contacted us and I reassured her that although the device was broken, we have a good chance of getting the data back.

    With time spent on the Broken USB Stick over the course of the day on Saturday, I was able to recover all of the data. I managed to get the data back to her on Sunday morning, so she could carry on working ready for the week ahead. I was also pleased to find out that the information on the USB stick was part of her charity work for people with special needs.

    The customer was local to us in Portsmouth so I had the pleasure in handing the recovered data to her personally.

     

  • What Is A Clean Room

    Some parts of our data recovery process require us to open a hard drive for internal repairs.

    John In Cleanroom

    We have a walk in clean room area on site, that allows us to carry out the necessary rework. It consists of an overhead air shower unit with a sealed enclosure that cleans and circulates the air within a specified tolerance. To keep particles to a minimum we wear a gown, gloves, and face mask to prevent contamination from outside.

    All hard drives are built in a clean room environment. Keeping small air particles out is crucial due the the complexity of the internal mechanism and tiny tolerance between the moving mechanical parts and internal disc surface that holds your data. When a hard drive requires any internal repair, it is critical that this work is carried out in a clean room.

    See our video about why you should never open a hard drive without a cleanroom.

  • Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2015

    Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2015

    Just a quick post today to wish everyone a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2015. We will be setting up some new equipment over the Christmas break to keep up with the latest hard drive failures. We will also be enjoying some much-deserved time off. If you have an urgent data recovery problem then please get in touch – we will still be taking calls & e-mails over the break. For anything less urgent, enjoy Christmas & New Year and we look forward to hearing from you in 2016!

  • Data Recovery Reviews

    If you have a comment about our service we’d love to hear from you. Scroll down to read past reviews, or click below to leave your comments.

     

  • Show or Hide Mac Files – Simple Bash Scripts

    Had to make these little scripts today.
    All they do is change AppleShowAllFiles to either YES or NO and then relaunch the Finder.

    No warranties for this, just thought it may help somebody out. 

    WARNING: This May Not Work, Or May Break Something. Keeping it online for reference only. 

    Script contents below:

    #!/bin/bash
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

    You may need to chmod +x to get these to run.

    Download Show Hide Mac Files / Folders Script.zip Download removed as I no longer use this, and I’m not sure if it still works. 

  • Memristors and HAMR Lasers

    TDK reckons it can use lasers to double hard drive density by heating platters and HP / Hynix want to take on flash memory with it’s Memristor technology.

    It makes a change to see two storage technology articles on general tech blogs in one day.

    TDK Laser Beam Story on El Reg

    HP Memristors Story on Slashdot

  • Steve Jobs 1955-2011 (Tribute)

    We would like to pay tribute to Steve Jobs. Apple have a photo on their homepage today which links to a remembering Steve Jobs page with a written tribute to the great man. This comes only weeks since he stepped down as Apple CEO.

    His legacy will live on, but his vision will be greatly missed. Who knows what the next game-changing Apple product may have been.

  • iPhone Skype Warning

    Cult of Mac have warned of an exploit in the Skype app which allows hackers to execute code on your device simply by sending a chat message. iPhone and iPod Touch are both affected. Skype is apparently aware of the problem and will be fixing it soon. Meanwhile be careful!

    Read on Cult of Mac