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Data Recovery - Put to the Test
Kurtis Kronk @TheTechLounge writes "Today we get a close look at perhaps the leader of this industry, ACR Data Recovery. I worked closely with Doug Roberts of ACR to find the answers to questions you might ask. Not only did I ask Doug an array of questions, I also received a sample of their Media Tools Professional 2003 to see for myself if it really works, and moreover, how well. Check out this article for the full story."
A few years ago we had an employee high up in our organization that found himself in a bit of a pickle. After about a month, he resigned from the company. When he returned his laptop, we realized he had fdisk'd his computer. He did not bother to setup the new partition either. We do know there was important data on the machine but it was not worth us sending it out for examination. It is to my knowledge that we most likely could have retrieved the data a lot easier because he did not write to the disk after he f'd it all up.
Sometimes you cannot help it. The person traveled all the time and kept some of his information on the laptop. Because of legal liability, I cannot really go into details about what we needed to get and why.
alias dir='rm -rf
Then:
He's admitting that his own company is a chop-shop! Thanks for the heads-up...
Game dev and music blog
Try waving a large electromagnetic coil over it. You may need to take the cover off to get as close as possible to the disk platters. While you're there, give the platters a good clean with some Wet & Dry to remove any ingrained dirt.
Uh huh - without touching the platters - right.
And no dust as well.
I would strongly suggest trying this on - oh say - 15 trow-away HD's before realizing that without a lot of experience you can forget about this course of action.
Send them to Ontrack or whatever : if it's worth your time to fiddle with the hardware, you can afford to send it away (or you are underpaid).
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
It's an infomercial, it's written on top of the article:
--8
ARTICLE: Data Recovery - Put to the Test
Sponsor: ACR Data Recovery
Date: 09/29/03
Reviewed by: Kurtis
--8--8--
As always, Slashdot is carefully screening articles.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In the end we did not even need it. Spent about 2-3 weeks restoring the mail server to various points and filtering and printing emails. The emails were evidence enough. Shortly after this, we put a 5 day deletion retention on our mail server so we at least have 5 backups of any email.
alias dir='rm -rf
Taking the platters out and putting them in a working drive is a perfectly reasonable solution, if you have the tools. Thats why most of these data recovery people have class 100 and below clean rooms on site.
Oh, there's a comparison all right. He compares Windows data recovery ("Windows writes to the hard drive when it boots up! It's evil!" -- ignoring the ability to boot from another drive and have the drive-to-be-recovered-from as, say, the secondary IDE slave) and DOS data recovery ("requires l33t low level programming sk1llz which only our employees have!"). And he ignores Linux data recovery software entirely - I actually haven't seen much in this regard, but it seems like all you'd really need is 'dd' and 'cp' and a robust file system driver.
I definitely concur with your recommendation of R-Studio on Windows. It's been invaluable to me for recovering data from partly-broken drives and for recovering deleted data.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
That's true. This is the worst "article" I've seen on /. in a long time.
/. today. The leader on the consumer side is OnTrack. These morons are selling software clones of which are probably available on sourceforge.
I love it how they refer to this "ACR" as a "leader in data recovery". No one ever heard of these bozos prior to getting exposure on
While the article itself is something of an advertisement, I _do_ have the Media Tools package and it _does_ work pretty well...horible documentation, though.
Now...staying relatively on-topic...lemme tell you just how bad OnTrack stinks. I needed a notebook PC's data recovered after a system crash. Instead of dinking around with it myself and possibly losing the data forever, I forked over some dinero to have OnTrack perform a recovery.
After two days of phone calls and emails, I finally get the info for shipping the HD. After it arrived at OnTrack's facility, I never heard word ONE from them...I had to call and badger them every time I needed a status update. After two weeks of waiting, I called only for them to tell me "Oh, I'm sorry we can't do anything with the disk." More than a month later, I finally got my HD back from them and that was only after I called a final time, talked with no less than three different people, and got a stammering apology. UPS delivered a NFG HD to me the next day.
If you plan on using OnTrack - don't. If you need data recovery - don't use OnTrack, try the recovery yourself or use a different vendor. I have crossed OnTrack off our corporate list of approved vendors and have promised to tell any of my peers who are looking for data recovery service to steer clear of OnTrack and their (very) dismal customer service.
-PONA-
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
From the article:
"To recover the data from the zip file, do not use WinZip or WinRAR. You will need a special DOS based ZIP program called PKZIP, which you can get here.(link)"
I guess "special" means "original." I STILL keep my PKZip 2.04G disk handy - just in case.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
OSX 10.3 now has 'secure delete' build into the OS. You can remove files using secure delete and it deletes the data and then nulls out the actual data on the drive with like 3 passes.