Data Recovery You Can Trust
This hard drive was from a Macbook Pro. As you can see in the image, loss of data was caused by a severe head crash. The damage is so severe you can actually see through the top foil layer to the glass platter beneath. Another good reason why Mac users should make sure they backup regularly.
We get asked this question a lot. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as a reliable hard drive. This is nothing against the hard drive manufacturers, but all drives will fail eventually. Hard drives are delicate machines and must be treated with care. They are not designed to be the one and only storage for all your work, photos and videos. Imagine your computer never booting up again, and then imagine it happening during the most important job you have ever done. That’s how bad it could be, and often is for a lot of people.
A good lifespan for a hard drive is now probably around 3-5 years. In reality we often see hard drives that are only a few months old. If you’re a gambler then maybe you have got away with it so far, but is it really worth the risk?
Backup your data. Maybe then you won’t need to find out how good we are at recovering it.
This Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drive suffered a head crash resulting in severe media damage. The contamination caused by the damage can be seen on the disc surface as well as the internal filter. The filter is usually white but is now silver metallic in colour as a result of the contamination. The customer did not have any indication that this was going to happen.
If we recover a good amount of your data, the easiest way to get your Mac running again is using the Migration Assistant – a standard Apple utility included with all modern versions of Mac OS X.
The process for restoration varies a little bit depending upon how your Mac is currently set up.
So you have a Mac which boots up to a desktop as normal, but without your recovered data. This is not quite ideal, and gives us a few things to sort out before the migration. If you’ve not yet had your data recovered, check our Mac Data Recovery Services.
You will first have to backup any newly created data. If something goes wrong with migration then you don’t want to lose your new data. If this new system has been created with the same username as the old one, you will not be able to import the old user without renaming which is not advised. After you have backed up your files, you could open “System Preferences / Users & Groups,” (“Accounts” in pre Lion systems) and rename the current user to something else. This will allow you to transfer your original user account and Applications into the correct locations on the new system. If your system is set to automatically login to a user account (ie. doesn’t require a password when you boot) then you will need to turn off “Automatic Login” setting under Users & Groups to allow you to access the old user account.
Fingers crossed you should be ready to migrate.
Connect the new hard drive to your Mac. If it’s a desktop 3.5” drive then plug in the power adapter and switch it on. If you are restoring to a laptop then it would be a good idea to have the AC adapter plugged in, as this can take a while.
Go to “Applications / Utilities” and launch “Migration Assistant”. Choose “From another Mac, PC, Time Machine Backup or other disk.” Then choose the second option; “From Time Machine Backup or other disk.” You should see the orange icon for the external drive, labelled with your job number. Click on it and then click continue.
You can choose to migrate everything, or be a bit selective. You cannot choose individual files to migrate, only whole user accounts, Applications, Settings, and other files. Make your choice and click next.
The migration itself can take a while depending how much data you have. Once complete you can boot into the Mac and it will feel very familiar. As if nothing ever failed. If you backed up any files from the new system then now would be a good time to load them back on.
Migration Assistant generally does a good job of transferring your data and software. If any software installs files into the Mac system in unusual locations it may need to be reinstalled, but most Applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop will be transferred correctly.
ZDNet has an interesting article about 4K sectors (Advanced Format), however what was more interesting was the bit about large SATA drives.
Today’s large SATA drives shouldn’t be used in 4 drive RAID 5 arrays due to the high likelihood of a read error after a drive failure, which will abort the RAID rebuild.
It is a common misconception that if you run a RAID system then you can avoid keeping backups. Although fault tolerant to a point, there are plenty of issues with RAIDs that can at best cause lengthy downtime and at worst prevent any recovery at all.
We at Dataquest have been aware of the problem with 1TB Seagate drives for some time. It is pleasing to see that Apple are also recognising the problem and are offering their customers a free swap out. These drives are mainly seen in iMacs, but you may also get them in the Mac Pro so make sure your back ups are up to date.
Sophos have recently announced a free version of their Antivirus software for Mac. The software has low system requirements and will find and quarantine Mac and Windows viruses, trojans and worms.
One word of caution comes from a Mac user who lost his entire Time Machine backups while using the new software. Sophos have been quick to mention that their software has been used on Macs for many years, and by hundreds of thousands of new free users without problems.
What this really shows is that if you delete files from you mac then your Time Machine volume is no longer a backup but the only live copy of the files. Either make multiple backups or leave the files on the original volume after backing them up. Also be aware when installing new software that you should have backup copies of your data in case it all goes wrong.
Update 11-11-2010:
It appears that this guy was having some problems with Time Machine before any of this happened.
Update 26-4-2019:
Removed link to software. Kept the post up for information.
I will start by saying that we can, and have, recovered data from these drives. As with all RAID recovery we carry out, we never use the original controller or drives to access the data. We image the drives on an individual basis and then work on these drives to rebuild the RAID using a form of RAID emulation. The most time consuming part of this type of recovery is discovering the RAID settings that the manufacturer has used.
Due to the complex nature of these NAS devices, we always recommend they are backed up to another form of media. Although recovery is possible, it can be expensive and relatively time consuming. Also if the unit is powered on and RAID rebuilds are attempted then the recovery can be made more complicated or even impossible.
The LaCie 5Big NAS device contains five hard drives and allows for a number of different configurations. One of these configurations is RAID 6, which works in much the same way as RAID 5, but with an additional parity stripe. This additional parity stripe uses an algorithm which requires a relatively high processing overhead, so RAID 6 has rarely been seen in consumer level devices. The low cost of processing means that RAID 6 is now a viable option for embedded NAS devices such as the LaCie 5Big.
The advantage of RAID 6 over RAID 5 is that with 5 disks it can theoretically cope with two disk failures. This gets round an increasingly common problem with large capacity RAID 5 arrays where if a second disk fails whilst rebuilding a failed disk, there should be enough parity information to continue the rebuild successfully.
It is important to remember that due to the complex nature of RAID arrays, it is crucial to make backups of the data to a different type of storage.
If you have a failed or broken LaCie 5Big then use the contact details on the right to contact us. Alternatively you can leave a comment here and we will get back to you.
We have recently started to see a peak in the number of 500GB WD drives sent to us from Western Digital MyBook World edition NAS Servers. These NAS devices use two WD5000AAKS drives in a RAID configuration.
The worrying thing for users is that even drives used in RAID 1 mirror mode are having problems, where either both drives are failing at the same time or where one drive has failed in the past and the other following suit some time later.
It is an important reminder that RAID does not equal backup. If there is important data on these types of devices, it also needs to be copied to another device for peace of mind.
We are currently able to recover the data from these devices using a combination of firmware repairs and other recovery methods.
An interesting note is that we have also seen a small increase in other WD drives at the moment, such as the 320GB WD3200AAJS drives from iMacs and WD5000AACS drives from external enclosures.
More to come I’m sure…