DIY Data Recovery

We constantly recommend users never, ever to try and perform “DIY data recovery” – yet by the time they speak to the professionals, it is often too late.

We hear stories of placing hard drives in a freezer, or even baking them in the oven. These are old wives’ tales and practices that will sometimes guarantee the total obliteration of data. Just search for an internet forum dealing with a “data recovery” thread and see exactly what we mean. Not a “pro” forum; rather, something like this.

There are hundreds of software recovery programs available all over the internet. Some are extremely good, but many are not, and could result in data destruction. The point we make is that if your hard drive is suffering from failing read-write heads or numerous bad sectors, running any commercial data recovery program will cause further damage. Always.

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Many data recovery companies have specialist, very expensive equipment to read data from failing drives, subjecting them to far less stress than that caused by the relentless thrashing they receive by data recovery software.

We have heard stories of users installing the data recovery software onto the actual failing drive, which will inevitably overwrite data, from which there are no data recovery solutions.

This DIY recovery approach is even more dangerous with RAID arrays. There are many causes of RAID storage failure, such as multiple hard drive failure, controller failure, RAID rebuild does not complete, power failure – the list is endless.

To that list we have to add user error – by far the commonest scenario we see of permanent loss of data that we would otherwise have had no problems whatsoever recovering.

One particular client we saw recently had a RAID 1 array. One drive started to show symptoms of failure, so their engineer removed the “failing” drive and ran some destructive tests on it which zeroed out the disk and moved the bad sectors (there were none) to the system area of the drive.

He then placed the “repaired” drive in the array, and started the rebuild.

What he was unaware of is that he rebuilt the entire array using the “repaired” drive as the source – and effectively zeroed out the disk still containing healthy data. This is by no means an isolated case.

We often see RAID 5 arrays where the user has removed and replaced the incorrect drive, resulting in massive corruption.

The long and short of it is that if your data is mission-critical, do not ever let a non-professional person attempt recovery. A Data Recovery company will generally be able to recover from the failure in a short period of time. Any responsible DR company will first image the original disks, and work only from the images – never from the original set.

Another scenario which is becoming more and more common is a situation where you have been told that your data cannot be recovered. In particular, we recently performed a full and successful recovery of an Apple Xsan storage area network – an extremely complex yet efficient method of storing data.

One of the three servers running RAID 3, striped to RAID 30, had suffered from multiple drive failure. The company who supplied the Xsan to our client said it was unrecoverable. Apple’s top Xsan engineer said the data was unrecoverable – “not possible to recover from the failure of more than one drive in RAID 3″ was the common factor. The manufacturer of the RAID servers (Infortrend) stated that recovery was impossible.

By this time, the user was convinced that there was nothing that could be done. To make matters worse, they (a London University) had a series of performances to produce in a few weeks, which meant they had to make a decision quickly. The client wanted to re-format the RAID (consisting of 56 hard disks) and start from scratch.

Fortunately, we persuaded them that we could recover the situation. We did. 100%.

The motto? Do not ever believe so-called “professionals” who have no concept of what a company like Retrodata is able to achieve. Against all the odds, we delivered the successful recovery, and the user was up and running in a week.

DIY data recovery is singularly the biggest cause of permanent data loss we encounter. If your data is worthless, then by all means have a go. Otherwise, leave it to the real professionals, who have the skills and experience. Even if you are a computer programmer, or you have a Doctorate in Physics, without the experience, tools and skills, data recovery will be the same for you as it is for an undergraduate.