Data Recovery Blog
A selection of our articles, written by us and not Ai generated. These are generally details of some of the recoveries we’ve completed, or other associated info.
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European Data Recovery Partner
Just recently I was able to meet up with one of our European business partners in Holland. The company is based in Amsterdam nd offers a national data recovery service. Although a young company, they already have a strong market presence and are growing all the time. Their English is excellent which is more than I can say for my Dutch. It is always good to put a personal face behind the telephone conversations.
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Spilt Coffee Liquid Damaged Laptop Hard Drive
Once again we had an enquiry from a customer who was at her wits end and wanted a second opinion. She had spilt coffee on her laptop that had all her family photographs. She had taken it to PC World where she had originally bought it. They advised her to use their internal recovery process, and sent it off for analysis. She was eventually told that there was no chance of recovering her data from the liquid damaged hard drive. But fortunately for her, against the advice she received, she decided to search online for another data recovery company. This…
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2TB Western Digital 2nd Opinion
Case Study Drive: WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Problem: Clicking. Previously diagnosed by a third party as unrecoverable due to media damage. We are always keen to test our services against our competitors, just to make sure we’re still up there with the best of them. When we heard from one of our service partners (ABC Rawpaw) that one of the top ranking data recovery companies on Google had given up on a customer’s drive, we were curious to take a look. It’s also worth mentioning that the client had paid £234 to the other company, despite them recovering no data. Third party report…
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Why Choose Dataquest
When your hard drive has failed, where do you turn for help? In many cases the supplier or manufacturer of your computer or hard drive are not the best place to deal with your data loss. Also your warranty only covers the hardware and not your lost files. So why choose us at Dataquest ? With over 15 years of experience we are very familiar with all types of hard drive failures. Unlike many other companies our costs are fixed and based on how quick you wish to have your recovered data returned. Like many other companies we offer a free diagnosis, but unlike many…
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PGP Whole Disk Encryption
PGP WDE is an encryption tool that uses a boot loader installed on an internal hard drive. This utility launches before Windows and prompts the user to input their password. Without the password you cannot gain access to the data. This utility is widely used by IBM personnel and is now part of IBM’s process that has to be adhered to by end users. Prior to this utility IBM hard drives were restricted access by a low level ATA hard drive password setup by the internal IBM IT department. As computer systems advanced and maybe as a result of a…
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Apple Mail Blank Screen on Rebuild in Mavericks
I had an issue in searching for content within Apple Mail. Every time I tried to search for any particular phrase the Mail application crashed and closed instantly. So I decided to Rebuild the Mailboxes. Before doing this I checked that my latest Time Machine backup had carried out successfully. (It had.) Once confirmed I clicked Rebuild from the Mailbox drop down menu. Instantly all the mail disappeared and I was left wondering whether it was doing anything. I was patient and waited to see what would happen and sure enough after a couple of minutes all my mail re-appeared intact.…
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Mavericks (10.9) Western Digital Data Loss (UPDATED)
We’ve been hearing reports of data loss with certain external hard drives after an upgrade to the latest Mac operating system Mavericks. The blame seems to fall to the disk management software that Western Digital bundle with their external hard drives. In response WD has removed WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare from their website until they figure out the problem. We have already had first-hand data recovery enquiries for such disks, so it remains to be seen if these issues can be resolved, or if the data is permanently damaged. One notable case involved a 6TB…
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What To Do When You Run Out Of Space
It’s a common problem that as we generate more data each year we start running out of space to put it. This is now even more of an issue in the smartphone market, where built-in cameras are generating increasingly large photos and videos, without providing much in the way of additional storage. The most common iPhones are still 16 & 32GB but the photos they now produce can be megabytes in size, with videos easily reaching 1GB. It’s tempting to take that data and put it somewhere else, so either a laptop or external hard drive. Then once you’ve copied…
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Maxtor DiamondMax Clockwise Discs
You have heard of the myth about water behaving differently from the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere. Especially when draining water out of a sink or bath. Well apparently this is a myth and not fact. So what has this got to do with hard drives? Well the same was said about some of the old Maxtor hard drives and why they were built with clockwise disc rotation. Where they built for the southern hemisphere market and do they work as well in the northern hemisphere. Built in mid 2000 the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives were designed…
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Time Machine Must Create A New Backup For You
The other day I got an error message from Time Machine that it wanted to start from scratch with the backups on my Time Capsule. As I only use the Time Capsule as one part of my backup routine that was no big deal. I made sure my other non Time Capsule backups were up to date and then clicked Start New Backup. But what if the Time Capsule had been my only backup? I’d have been running without a backup for as long as Time Machine takes to backup my machine from scratch. Somehow I’ve trimmed my work laptop down…