Data Recovery Blog

With the weather getting warmer, many of us will be making a beeline for the beach. Our phones will inevitably go with us in order to capture that perfect family portrait or, possibly, a selfie with friends. Whilst the reasons for taking our phones to the beach are obvious, it’s not a particularly tech-friendly environment. Sand can clog up small entry points, mobile devices don’t usually like the heat and last but by-no-means least, there’s the obvious potential for water damage which, all too often, leads to problems including, but not limited to, data loss.Of course, phones suffer from water damage at all times of the year but, as trips abroad and local beaches will result in an incr...

As you can imagine, data recovery companies receive multiple drives – and therefore a truly enormous amount of data – on a daily basis. A significant portion of this data could be described as personal and/or sensitive. This is precisely why any company that deals in the act of recovering data from failed hard drives, phones, PCs etc. must adhere to the data protection act (soon to be replaced by the GDPR) and ensure that all information gleaned from any device remains confidential. In recent years, a trend has developed amongst employees which has seen them bring, and use, their own devices at work (dubbed BYOD or Bring Your Own Device). These devices tend to contain personal and...

We’ve recently written about how SSDs work and how, due to their lack of moving parts, they are far less likely to suffer from mechanical faults than HDDs as well as offer faster read/write speeds.Lower costs aside, it would seem that HDDs have no real advantages over flash-based media, but this is not entirely true: as the cells of devices that utilise flash technology can only be adjusted (to either prevent or allow an electrical current to flow through them) a set number of times, all such devices have a finite lifespan. Alternatively, each small sector of a HDD can be magnetised and de-magnetised indefinitely. This is unlikely to be an issue for the majority of non-commercial...

It doesn’t matter how large your house is, you’re gradually going to accumulate enough possessions that it’s no longer big enough; the same is true of data storage. The storage capacity of all widely-used media may have increased significantly in recent years but we’ll always seem to find a way to fill them. Just as a house overloaded with items results in its owner needing to dispose of some, store them elsewhere or move to a larger home, the owner of a piece of storage media bursting at its metaphorical seams is left with little choice but to replace, delete or relocate. With the former being the most expensive option, we thought we’d share our top five tips on how to free up...

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives – this should give you a pretty good idea of how a RAID differs from your normal hard drive. Yes, you’ve guessed it: a RAID is comprised of multiple drives rather than a single one. Thanks to something called a RAID controller, though, any device connected to an array knows to treat the drives contained within it as a single entity rather than a collection of separate ones; like if you had two separate drives inside a PC for instance. The benefits of using RAID differ depending on a user’s needs. A collection of drives can be used to increase the operating speed of the device to which it is attached, to store significantly larg...

Often, when we discuss the capacity of a type of storage media, we will refer to the amount of data that it can store as its memory. Whilst it would be perfectly clear what someone meant if they made such a claim and, furthermore, it is widely deemed to be an acceptable – if colloquial – description, the word ‘memory’ actually refers to something different. Similar, but different nevertheless! Storage media such as hard drives, SSDs etc. store data and it would therefore be technically correct to state that they have a storage capacity of 4TBs, for example. Memory, like data storage space, is measured in the same way (i.e. megabytes, gigabytes and so on) but does not actually stor...

We and numerous other companies within the data recovery and tech-spheres have written about how, in the age of big data, we’re producing files at such a rate that there is an urgent need for media to offer far greater storage density than is currently possible. Several potential solutions for this problem have been posited by scientists throughout the last decade. One, though, has captured the imagination like no other: DNA Digital Data Storage.   Yes, for more than a decade the material that forms the building blocks of life has been touted as a means of storing vast quantities of data in unimaginably small spaces. In 2012, a journal published the results of a study conducte...

It’s clear that smartphoneshave revolutionised the way we live. We’re only ever a few clicks away from the latest news or discovering what’s happening in our friends’ lives, but all this increased connectivity comes at a cost: low-battery anxiety. Research has shown that an astonishing 90% of us feel anxious when our smartphone’s battery drops below 20% (considering how anxious many of our clients are as a result of them needing iPhone data recovery services, we're not surprised) so, with this in mind, Fields Data Recovery thought we’d share our top five tips for extending your iPhone’s battery life. Don’t worry Android fans, we’ll be writing a piece for you shortly. 1. &nbs...

Following on from our post explaining how HDDs work, we thought we’d follow it up with a piece on how SSDs – and all flash-based storage media for that matter – works. As we’ve stated previously, hard drives store data by writing it onto a thin layer of magnetic material. The data is translated into a series of ones and zeroes that is known as binary. This is then translated back into the piece of data you stored whether an audio file, word document or anything else when you open it. Flash-based media also uses binary, but not magnets. As HDDs store a series of ones and zeroes by magnetising or de-magnetising each small sector of a platter (a magnetised sector represents a 1 and...

SSDs are quicker, are growing in popularity and are viewed - amongst those with an interest in technology, at least – as being significantly sexier than HDDs. So much so, that some have predicted that SSDs are to HDDs what Netflix is to DVDs or, perhaps more accurately, what DVDs where to VHS: a superior piece of technology that will render its competitor obsolete. With the emergence of big data, cold storage and cloud computing, though, the HDD has found itself markets within which its significantly superior cost to storage ratio makes it a more practical option than flash-based storage media. Additionally, manufacturers quickly recognised that, in order to corner this new market,...