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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."
Whenever I think of Data Recovery, I always get this mental image of a hard drive in an operating table, and all these geeky guys with glasses and long white coats poking and prodding it with scalpels.
Looks more like an advertisement to me.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is an advertisement. ACR is allowed to prattle on endlessly about all the things they've done w/o any analysis or even details...this is Slashdot, and for an article to work it needs to have the details. This is just cheerleadering at its worst--I won't waste time and ask, "why was this posted" but instead simply cut to the chase--this article isn't worth anyone's time.
BTW - if you have *real* data recovery issues try Ontrack They can recover data from dead hard drives.
This wasn't an article, or review. I'm thinking it's 'looking for people to send me free stuff to review'-esque.
I just served as an expert witness for a software theft case. Data recovery was vital in proving when and where the software was copied. ...and yes, the interview seemed a bit like a self-promo piece.
Then:
He's admitting that his own company is a chop-shop! Thanks for the heads-up...
Game dev and music blog
Often data recovery is used because of intentional "user" actions. Such as, say, the disgruntled IT employee who tried to erase the contents of a hard drive which contained the evidence of his (insert crime or suspicious activity here) with out using a secure wipe utility (which may very well still be recoverable by the truely professional recovery shop, I dunno).
Even so, I don't know anyone one that makes backups in less than 24 hour increments. You can do an awful lot of work inbetween last night's backup and tonight's. If your computer go to the great network in the sky (ok, bad metaphore) before the next backup, there could still be a lot of data to recover.
From the article (attributed to Mr. Roberts):
:D
Another warning sign is when a company gives a success rate. Companies do this to play off your insecurities. They know you want your data back and are telling you what you want to hear. In other words, any company that gives a success rate is lying.
Ummm... or maybe they understand that my number one criteria is success rate and they are honest, scrupulous, hard working individuals, trying to portray their market standing.
Of course I'd prefer if someone could do an independent review...
Damn I wish I had a couple grand of hard drives to destroy
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
This "story" seems to be nothing more than a thinly disguised ad for the products and services of a specific company. There's nothing of any technical interest or value here.
/. going to get story modding rights so we can remove this stuff from the front page?
Now when are readers of
John.
Maybe SCO can use these guys to find their code in the Linux kernel! Then they wouldn't have to resort to displaying random functions in slide presentations and waving their hands a lot (presumably to dissipate the ensuing stink).
When I destroyed a fat16 hard drive lately, A friend of mine and myself didn't like the tools we found, so we wrote our own. http://www.mit.edu/~raindel/ This tool: puts together 2 fat tables to make one. searches for fat chains. locates directories and builds whatever directory structure is available. sooner or later I will get around to make a general purpose free software tool out of this, but I have other stuff to do first. Me. P.s Backup is simply not enough.
From: cberfield@microsoft.com
To: Slashdot editors
I am the Marketing Director at a big IT company, can you please email me the prices for infomercial articles on Slashdot.
Thank You!
Chris Berfield
Marketing Director : Internet Division
Microsoft Corporation
I hope you got a decent cut from this "sponsored by" infomercial, because you're now on my shit list along with those duping buffoons michael and Taco. Or is your share just from the ads that get served on Slashdot to everyone that's currently pointing out what a lazy, slipshod muppet you are? Hey, subscribers; did you enjoy paying to read this infomercial before anyone else did? Did that give you a warm fuzzy?
On the bright side, at least Hemos got to post this first. When michael or Taco dupes it later, Slashdot will have hit its nadir.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
It started off as a hobby, sort of. I used to work for the old WordPerfect corporation where we had customers that sent in floppies that had "REALLY IMPORTANT" documents on them that had become corrupted or partially deleted, one way or another.
Data recovery tools weren't as advanced as they are nowadays so it was a much more arduous task. I had to scour the floppies and pull off as much data as possible, mostly using the old debug command under DOS. I was mostly doing it for fun as the WordPerfect corporation didn't want to become file recovery experts. I was just into it for the challenge and to offer a nice service to our customers.
I recovered data off a floppy that had a pencil stuck through it, floppies that had been formatted (easy) partially erased by magnets (tough), and various methods of corruption and deletion - including accidentally saving a blank document over the top of an existing document... OOPS!
I was once asked "How do you recover the data?" and I had a tough time answering, as each case was different from the other. I just told them that "Performing data recovery is like running a sausage mill backwards to manufacture pigs." What comes out of the process doesn't look pretty, but its better than starting from scratch.
I then went on to recovering data from hard drives. After WordPerfect I became a 'consultant'. One Monday morning, one of my customers had their WIN NT 3.51 server hard drive crash. It was a head crash, you could hear the heads riding the platter. An awful noise that once you hear it, you know you're screwed.
I spent 16 hours pulling data from that hard drive, and once I was done (I had pulled as much data as I could) we opened up the drive to discover that the head on the bottom platter had fallen down, and had been riding there over the weekend. It had etched away at the platter for so long that the platter had actually fallen down and was sitting in a pile of HDD shavings at the bottom of the drive. Sheesh!
Over the years I collected numerous utilities for data recovery, but I started getting out of it once LBA mode drives came out and the actual hard drives were being managed internally, rather than by the OS. Not that it made it more dificult, but you saw fewer and fewer hard drive errors because MS was finally removed from their management position over the HDD data.
Anyhow, back to work...
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.