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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Why Your Free Gmail Account Could Disappear Forever (and What You Can Do)
Using a free Gmail account? You might not realize it could vanish without warning — and it may not even be your fault. Here’s the catch: If someone tries to log in and gets your password wrong too many times, your account gets locked. No big deal, right? Well, only if you’ve added a backup recovery email. If you haven’t, you’re stuck. There’s no way to unlock it, and free accounts don’t get any support from Google. That’s right — no one can help you, not even Google itself! Time to check your recovery settings!
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The Death of Undelete
Deleting files and formatting disks just got a whole lot more dangerous! Back in the good old days, before fast SSDs, and multi Terabyte disks, if you accidentally deleted a file, you could be fairly confident that you could get it back. In classic Mac OS, it wasn’t uncommon to have Norton UnErase running every time your Mac shut down, to show a list of deleted files for you to optionally restore. Not to be overdramatic, but those days are pretty much gone. What changed? With modern disks you cannot run a quick undelete to recover files. In fact, even…
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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 again after that. Even just powered up and idle, the SSD will run background processes to start cleaning out sectors marked as deleted. Like a snake eating its own tail, you’ll be destroying the data as you attempt to recover it. ♾️ The Long Version…
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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 can bring the service back online at some point, or how long that could take. In the meantime, we’ve now recovered a few of these drives, so if you need access to your data, get in touch. Affected Models: Cannot Login to My Cloud
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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 mention all the millions of phones & tablets with soldered storage. Benefits From a manufacturing point of view, soldering the SSDs makes sense. Fewer “bulky” connectors on the motherboard can lead to thinner and lighter computers. Because a 5mm thick laptop is just not thin…
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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 label was burnt off. Where to start with the recovery It’s easy to get overwhelmed by a case like this, but it’s important to break the problem down into manageable chunks. First we needed to extract the unique information from the circuit board (PCB). The…
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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 with no known impact, and all unrecoverable due to media damage. What is media damage? In a hard drive, the discs are the media, and damage is caused by impact from the heads or another internal part. Usually this takes a certain amount of force…
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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 drive with an extra plain label over the usual manufacturers label. This is not unheard of, but is unusual, and made us a bit suspicious. We peeled back the plain label, and underneath was a 120GB hard drive, that looks like it was pulled from…
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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 calculate how long the process will take. With a faulty disk, this is not possible. A faulty disk will often read different blocks at different speeds depending on how bad the problem is. Until we read the block, there’s no way to know how long…
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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 forever, because the other 112GB just doesn’t exist. The card reports 128GB of useable space, but anything above 16GB gets written into thin air. You don’t even get an error until you try to read back the files later. We’ve seen all sorts of fake…