Data Recovery Blog

Website Enterprise Storage Forum recently surveyed IT professionals working in businesses throughout the UK in order to both gauge their plans for the next two years and form a better understanding of their current practices. The resulting report, published on the 21st August, contains a number of important findings. Here’s a summary of what we found the most interesting: Backups still aren’t as important as they should be Yes, when it comes to the importance of backing up data and having an effective data recovery plan in place, we’re biased. Whilst you’d be hard pushed to find a more partisan opinion than ours, though, it’s still objectively correct to state that data loss...

Thanks to improvements in mobile technologies, devices of all kinds are able to share information with one another seamlessly. Cars are one such device and, whilst the majority of cars currently on the road are not connected to the cloud, this is certain to change over the next few years. Manufacturers have adapted finance models to make their products more affordable and, perhaps more importantly, are becoming increasingly more aware of how valuable the data collected by their vehicles could be. It’s important to state that, whilst connection is vital to the highly-anticipated rollout of fully autonomous cars (and this will certainly revolutionise the way we travel) the focus of...

Hard drives and water, like cats and dogs, do not mix well. Sadly, whether due to an accidental spillage, a burst pipe or flood, they regularly come into contact with one another. In many cases, this will be of little concern to those affected. We almost all have some type of data that is important to us, but when data loss has been caused by something which has resulted in more pronounced and widespread damage, its loss will pale in comparison to the importance of repairing damaged properties, vehicles and other items. To those whose livelihoods are invariably linked to their data, however, losing it is understandable a pressing concern. Good news: lost data can be recovered… but...

Whilst the use of SSDs in data centres is certainly growing (we've recovered data from thousands of enterprise SSDs), their lower power consumption and cooling costs are still offset by the fact that they store less data than enterprise HDDs and are more expensive. But could that be about to change? Intel have unveiled an SSD capable of storing 32TBs of data (three times the amount of data held in the U.S. congressional library, according to their press release) and that produces no sound whatsoever. The Intel® SSD DC P4500 also utilises a dramatically different design to previous SSDs: it’s roughly the size of a 12-inch ruler (the type many readers might remember using in scho...

Recovering data from a failed, damaged or mismanaged piece of storage media can be a complex process. By identifying the problem, the most appropriate solution and the tools that will be required before beginning the recovery process, however, the whole thing becomes a lot more manageable.   For this reason, each piece of media – whether an SSD, RAID array, smartphone or anything else – that arrives in our lab goes through the same robust ISO-approved four-stage process; ensuring that we’ve identified the best possible means of recovering the data present on it.   Data recovery process step one: the initial assessment   Before any data can be recov...

Whilst there's no denying SSDs have become far more commonplace over the last decade or so (SSD Data Recovery is a search term that regularly leads people to our website) they're still not quite as ubiquitous as initially expected. This, though, could be about to change: the price of solid state drives (SSDs) are set to fall significantly in the latter half of 2018, a market research firm has claimed. DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, have precited that the cost of NAND Flash will fall by 10 per cent in successive quarters in the second half of 2018. Historically, the opposite has been true with prices driven up by manufacturers purchasing cells in preparation f...

Did you know that the amount of digital data stored in the world is doubling every two years? How about the fact that more than 90% of the data we store is only accessed and used within the three-month period that follows its creation? In short, chances are that most of us will either need to clear out our hard drives or invest in some extra storage at some point. Here then are our top tips for those that need to store more data: 1.       Do a data audit Like we’ve said previously, 90% of all data is only accessed within the first three months of its existence. To put it another way, you may not need 90% of all of the data you have stored on your...

According to several experts, society is on the verge of a data storage crisis. Research has suggested that the total amount of data stored worldwide is doubling every two years. Additionally, more than 90% of the data we create is only accessed within the first three months of its existence before going on to spend the rest of its days accruing metaphysical dust. In short, we need media with significantly greater storage densities than those currently on offer – but how will we achieve this? Fortunately, several means of increasing the density of existing technologies have emerged in recent years, as have new and innovative means of storing data. Notable examples of the former inc...

It may have already been the reason that thousands upon thousands of people around the globe have lost access to their data, but ransomware shows no signs of abating. In fact, it’s becoming more effective. Having begun to infect the storage media of unsuspecting users in January of this year, GandCrab ransomware quickly gained notoriety following it becoming ne’er-do-well’s virus of choice. Those who were inclined to do so could simply purchase the malware via the dark web and then proceed to infect unsuspecting targets with just a few clicks. This, of course, effectively opened up cybercrime to nefarious individuals who otherwise lacked the technical knowledge required to hold oth...

Clicking hard drives cause so much panic that they spawned the term ‘click of death’. Whilst a clicking hard drive is never good news, though, it isn’t necessarily a reason to panic. There are multiple reasons why a hard drive can click and although this invariably means there’s a problem, it isn’t necessarily always the extremely problematic mechanical kind people usually expect (though we’d still recommend powering down immediately, just in case). It’s entirely possible that the clicking sound is being caused by a firmware issue rather than mechanical failure, for example. In such instances, it will not be necessary to replace any parts of the drive and the process of recover...