Data Recovery Blog

We are, quite literally, surrounded by particles, pollutants and contaminates that are invisible to the naked eye. Fortunately, the vast majority of them are unhazardous and it’s extremely unlikely that they would cause you any harm. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your hard drive! Don’t worry, you don’t need to keep your HDD in a hermetically sealed environment – it’s only the platter of the drive itself that is sensitive to these impurities and this is protected by the outer shell of the hard drive itself. Should it become necessary to open the drive – in order to repair damaged parts or recover data, for example – then it is essential that this is done in a control...

We’re creating data at a truly exponential rate – something that is in no small part down to the growth of smartphones. As these devices are physically small, however, the amount of data that a user can store on them is often limited. With the technological and economic breakthroughs needed to change this still some way away, the need to either free up or create some extra storage space on mobile devices is something that many users struggle with on a daily basis. Here are Fields Data Recovery’s top five tips for increasing your smartphone’s storage: 1.       Delete what you don’t use Are you, honestly, ever going to play Candy Crush again? You can’...

Cold data storage is the term used to describe the task of storing data that is rarely or potentially never accessed. You may wonder why any individual or organisation would choose to retain this data but there are numerous possible explanations for this. Did you know, for example, that the vast majority of the data that we all create is never accessed? As we’re also creating data at a faster rate than ever before, the need to optimise our storage solutions and keep data that is infrequently accessed off our primary storage media is all too apparent. Your attic is an obvious metaphor: you have only a limited amount of space to store things in your house so you keep the items that...

Smartphone data recovery and variations on this search term have, over the last few years, grown into some of our biggest sources of traffic and enquiries. To understand why, you only need to consider how these devices are now used. Mobile phones first became commonplace when I was in my early teens in the late nineties. The introduction of pay-as-you-go plans proved to be a popular choice for those who’d been concerned about expensive monthly bills and the market grew at a remarkable rate. Before this, it was unusual to know someone who owned a mobile phone, today it’s considered strange if someone doesn’t. Today’s phones are also considerably more advanced than those we wer...

For many years, hard disk drives have been, and still are, the most popular form of storage media. In fact, following them having become affordable and having made floppy disks obsolete, they have become seemingly omnipresent. Just as these drives evolved over time, though (early examples were the size of your average wardrobe and stored only a few kilobytes of data) so have the techniques that we use in order to store our documents, photos, music etc. Hard drives store information by writing it onto the magnetic layer of a disk known as a platter. When you then want to access that data, the disks motor spins this platter so that the location of the data is placed below the drives...

Data loss can affect anyone and, as the information that businesses store is often vitally important to their day-to-day activities, it’s something that can have a substantial effect on both their financial and logistical performance. Here, Fields Data Recovery list the five most common causes of data loss and a few tips on how to avoid them: Human Error Yes, the IT systems that we utilise in our businesses are becoming increasingly more complex, but it’s still good old-fashioned mistakes that are the most common cause of data loss. Whether it’s accidentally deleting files, configuration errors or anything else, you cannot eradicate human error but you can go a long...

Over the past few decades, hard drives have been the most common form of data storage for both individuals and businesses alike. Devices utilising flash media such as SSDs and USB drives have been growing in popularity, though, and are now commonly used in off-the-shelf consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. Many commentators and consumers have argued that this represents a shift in data storage trends; that the hard drive is in decline and due to fall into obsolescence. But just how accurate are these claims? There can be little doubt that the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets has contributed greatly to the adoption of flash media. Flas...

For some, the cloud is almost mystical; like the data contained there is somehow metaphysical and is simply pulled out of the air when we retrieve it. The truth is actually much more straightforward. The data that you store in the cloud is actually still present on some type of storage media just like you have in your own devices. The media that holds your data (which is probably a HDD) will be present in a server in a data centre. The key fact here is that the media used in these data centres is just as vulnerable as the media you use at home or in your office. Yes, some providers will have sophisticated backups in place but this doesn’t mean that you can be certain that data...

“How do I recover deleted photos?” is a question Fields Data Recovery’s technicians are asked daily. It may even surprise you to hear that a large number of our technicians feel that recovering digital photo and video files for clients is the most rewarding part of their job – more rewarding than a substantial breakthrough concerning research and development, even – but why? I think it’s because photographs and video files exemplify how data can transcend mere information and become something truly emotive. The sense of relief and then elation felt by clients after we’ve recovered photographs of their wedding day or a video of their child taking their first steps is evident an...

Hard drives are truly remarkable. They can store gargantuan amounts of data which we rely on every day (hard drive recovery is a service that's always in demand) and do so by using a combination of two things: magnets and binary. Within every hard drive is one or (and this is much more likely with modern hard drives) multiple platters. These are disks made from materials such as aluminium and are coated with a thin layer of metal that is capable of being magnetised. Every platter within a hard drive also has both a read and a write head. As their name suggests, write heads are used to write data on to platters and read heads to read it. But how? Each platter contains billi...