Data Protection and Recovery

What is data recovery? Data recovery is one of those jobs that should be handled in a highly professional manner, data comes in various forms, photos, documents, videos and others. What data recovery means in any context is the recover of lost, delete or corrupted data. If you decide to choose data recovery you should always ask the person performing the data recovery what level of recovery they use this generally refers to the kinds of techniques used to recover data. This can be as simple as using specialized software to recover a lost partition table, or as in depth as requiring a full platter transplant, personally I don't do the platter transplants or anything of the manner but I do do software recovery. Indicators of potential data loss looming - Before a storage drive decides to give up the ghost you may see indicators imply a failing drive. The indicators can vary however they can typically follow the this pattern of behavior, which implies are potential loss event is potentially going to occur now or in the early future.

• Disks randomly disconnecting and reappearing - This can imply a failing PCB controller board, but it can also be something as simple as a bad cable or connection.

  
  

• Disks randomly getting locked up and being unresponsive - Sometimes leading to a total system crash

  
  

• Pagefile failures - Pagefile is the virtual memory of a computer basically if you have 8GB of RAM you can give a computer 8GB of pagefile which will move applications which don't need to be in RAM onto the page file. Pagefile failures can also cause total system crashes.

  
  

• Random ticking or clicking - This can indicate an actuator going bad, it is highly recommend you act quickly to ensure the data on this drive is backed up immediately, or it could indicate a read head has already slammed into the platter and caused potential damage.

  Tools used for data recovery can be as simple as software or as complicated as requireing a specialised environment, and tools.

  
  

• Software - At the highest level of data recovery there is two key sections we must consider one is the partition table and second is the general deletion of data and what "deleting" actually does.

  • Partition table lost - A hard drive contains various virtual elements one of these is is the structure of partitions these are sort of like a grouping of boxes and those boxes have dividers in them, each labelled with a letter those letters mean different storage locations for different items. If this partition table becomes accidentally deleted or corrupted software tools can be used to attempt to recover the data.
    

  • General deletion of data - Accidental deletion of data is fairly simple to fix as long as you haven't had the drive active for too long following the deletion when you delete a file it does actually "disappear" it gets marked as "unused space" but what is there is still data just untagged, think of it like a letter box with no number on it while a occupant is moving out, and once the a new owners move in the letter box is now assigned to that person who moved in. So to prevent further damage to the data contained on your disk immediately stop using your computer, this will ensure the system does not attempt to overwrite the original data blocks whose pointer you deleted. Oh I should explain what a pointer roughly is it's the tag pointing to the location of disk which contains the data when you delete data you only delete that pointer not the actual data.

    
    

• Controller PCB failure - This is the intermediary system involved in communication between the host system and the hard drive, without this there is no command control instructions which are needed to operate the entire drive. This also requires the ROM chip which contains the control software for the drive to be transferred to the new PCB, that involves desoldering the board with the original ROM chip.

  
  

• Actuator failure - Actuators in a hard drives are a marvel of engineering they are incredibly precise and used to position the read head over the tiny microscopic magnetic dipoles which is a fancy name for the magnetizing of each little "spot" with a 1 or 0 which is binary code for the entire disk, if an actuator failure occurs it typically requires the removal of the entire disk platter assembly and transplanting into a similar drive.

  
  

• Platter disassembly - This requires a type of desktop based air circulation and filtration system the HDA - Hard Disk Assembly of a hard drive is very very sensitive to static electricity and dust in this case a failure in the controller can cause the read head in a HDD to "slam" into the platter shaving off pieces of the drive.

Tools involved in Advanced Data Recovery - To do data recovery correctly in the advanced case requires specialised equipment. This equipment is critical to successfully performing a data recovery situation correctly the first time without heightened risk to the underlaying data, bare in mind these tools are not only used in data recovery but in practically all electronics projects if you are very serious on working is electronics.

• Industrial Inspection Microscope - A typically bionocular microscope designed to allow microsoldering and circuit board inspection to be carried out much easier, they can also provide you with a camera mount to allow you to record your repair jobs.

  
  

• Micro soldering - Soldering systems which are designed to allow the ease of soldering at small scale. This is typically SMD level components or surface mount devices which are compact and tiny.

  
  

• Controller software interrogator / Terminal access establisher - Because disks have a ROM chip this ROM chip is somewhat like an operating system we call it firmware that firmware can be queried about the status of a disk or drive and about the errors it has experienced.

  
  

• Clean Room hood, or "Clean room" - The hood or the clean room is a specialised protection facility to allow the safe opening of the component called the HDA - Hard Disk Assembly also known as the internal guts of a hard drive, those guts are incredibly sensitive to dust particles the simple way to allow you to open a HDA is a bench clean room hood or in the sense of large operation a dedicated clean room. Clean rooms are also used in many other fields of industry and it is infact possible to build one with the correct equipment.

  
  

• Platter extraction holders - This is a specialised tool that "grabs" onto the platters and locks them into place, to prevent misalignment in future and allows the disks to be quickly replaced back into their drives with no issue with disk alignment problems because the extraction holder will "lock and keep" the disks aligned, in some very fancy cases robotic arms maybe used which offer unparallelled precision in the extraction of the platters.

Data Loss Prevention - Customers maybe worried now that there is nothing that can be done to prevent the loss of your data. Far from it you have many ways to ensure the protection of your data. Each adds an additional layer of protection.

• Offline storage - Using some type of backup medium in the form of an external drive, this could be a flash drive, a hard drive, or even optical media such as DVD, CD or Bluray, but in terms of flexibility an external drive such as an SSD, HDD or flash drive is the best candidate. A note also about businesses you can also use tape-drive units, these provide a secure way to backup data ot magnetic medium for long term storage, but tape drives do have draw backs.

  
  

• Online Storage - Many cloud provider SaaS (Software As A Service) options are available such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iDrive and many others you can backup data to these cloud providers to improve the resilliency of your data protection measures, you may also potentially have access to a PaaS solution also known as Platform As A Service where your data might be backed up to a Cloud file storage provider or a Block storage provider this is still a type of storage solution for preventing data loss.

  
  

The term also here is "defense in depth" we are creating a defense of your data in various layers, which is a term borrowed from the cybersecurtiy industry to provide multiple layers of protection from a risk that risk is the loss of data.

Do you know someone or have you yourself experienced a catastrophic data recovery situation comment below.