Data Recovery from Jaz Disks

mach-5 writes "I recently had an Iomega Jaz disk fragged by the drive (the data is corrupt from simply using the disk in another drive). I know that I can easily get a free (beer) replacement from Iomega, but what I really want is my data back, which is far from free. This is a little unfair considering their drive corrupted my disk. Has anyone had any success in having their data recovered by a drive company. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?"

Comments

Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair.

[foobar104]

uuh...NO. they arent a backup medium. ever read the warranty information on the box ? they are most certainly NOT a backup medium. CDR's, AIT/DLT tapes are a backup medium.

uuh...NO. CDRs and magnetic tapes have lifespans measured in mere decades.

This is a backup medium. If it can't last 10,000 years submerged in salt water or in a mountain cave, I'm not interested.

(HHOS)

MTBF is the name of the game...

[digitalmuse]

Well, mach-5, I hate to add another negative voice to the chorus, but yeah, the disk is fsck'ed. If you can't fsck it with the standard commercial recovery packages, you are also fsck'ed. But the first thing you hear when you get a warm body on the other end of the Iomega Hotline will be, "we'll replace the media, but we can't be responsible for the data."
And as unkind as it may sound, they're right. Check your documentation, it says it right there. the drive can grind it's happy little heads through your magnum opus, negating all those thousands of hours of grad-school, and all you're going to get out of Iomega is a new disk. That's the way it is, and that's the way it always will be. Every piece of mass-storage equipment in my house and office has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) which is a fanciful metric that tells you how often you can expect said piece of HW to go tits-up and die. Iomega knows that their storage solutions have these limitations, and they inform you of this up front, with that MTBF rating.
Jaz drives are great for backups, but you can't expect them to last forever, and you're a fool if you think that Murphy's law isn't hiding around the corner looking to fubar your day.
You cannot expect Iomega to take responsibility for every cartridge they produce, no matter what conditions it is exposed to. It is not Iomega's job to ensure that they can recovery everything that is every put onto those spinning platters. I do not know of any company that has that kind of a guarantee, and I'd be very wary of a company that promised it could. Entropy will always increase, and 3am hardware failure can deliver more entropy than you can shake a stick at.
None of this does you any good in your present position, but just like any other emotional tradgedy, there are steps and goals to help you with coping. Don't hate Iomega, how old was that disk, how much use had it gotten? Was it something you re-wrote over every evening to transfer stuff from work to home? Unless it died right out of the box (right on the leading edge of the bathtub-curve) you got at least some measure of use out of it, and Iomega succeded in delivering a product that worked. I know people who have used the same Jaz cartridge for 5+ years, millions of cycles, without incident. Others have had bad media that went south in a week.
Iomega is not to blame for the statistical blip that you were on the receiving end of, and there is almost nothing they can do for you at this point. I'm not trying to push responsibility onto you for the failure, but you can't really blame Iomega, and they are not going to eat the recovery cost for the data.
And that brings us to the next step, recovering your data. This is something you're going to have to pay for out of your own pocket, and you probably want to analyize your options before you start writing checks. There are several companies that do drive recovery and have a 'free-evaluation' process. You ship them the drive, they tell you how much cash to cough up to recovery it. This gives you an option to decided if all that pr0n is really worth $4000 of your student loan money. I would suggest talking to someplace like Accurate Data Recovery, Flat Rate Data Recovery or some other place that isn't liable to hand you a $3000+ bill for pulling the data. note: I have no experience or interest in these companys. YMMV, do your homework, google.com is your friend.
All else fails, rip off the housing, drill a hole in the platter and nail it to the wall in your data center. This may act as a gruesome deterent to the other equipment in the room and keep them in line. Good luck.