We constantly recommend that users never, ever attempt DIY data recovery – yet by the time they end up speaking to professionals, it is usually too late.
We hear stories of users placing hard drives in a freezer, or even baking them in the oven. Some recommend hitting the drive at an angle with a hammer. These are old wives’ tales and practices that will almost all guarantee the destruction of data. But then, data recovery companies tend to be considered by people who spread this nonsense as immoral, dishonest extortion rackets.
There are many data recovery software programs available all over the internet. Some are extremely good, but plenty are not. The point we make is that if your hard drive is suffering from failing read-write heads or numerous bad sectors, running a data recovery program will often cause further damage.
We have seen drives subjected to days and even weeks of abuse from programs such as Disk Warrior, Spinrite, Norton Disk Doctor – and any number of free “data recovery utilities” (read “drive destroyers”). By the time we get to diagnose these drives, the entire platter surface has been abraded and the data has been transformed to clouds of dust scattered about the drive. Look at our gallery – there are some extreme examples.
Many data recovery companies have special, very expensive equipment to read data from failing drives, subjecting them to very little stress compared with the relentless overload forced on them by data recovery software.
We have heard stories of users installing the data recovery software directly onto the actual failing drive, which will almost inevitably cause some data to be overwritten and unrecoverable.
This DIY approach is even more dangerous with RAID arrays. RAID storage can fail in a number of methods, such as multiple hard drive failure, RAID 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 to the reserved 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 (DR) 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 we are seeing more often is one where the client has been told the data cannot be recovered. In this case, it concerned the recovery of an Apple Xsan storage area network – an efficient and high-speed storage network, yet recoverable only by a few companies in the industry.
One of the three servers running RAID 3 had multiple drive failure. The company who supplied the user with the network said it could not possibly be recovered. 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 general gist. 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 due in a few weeks, which meant they had to make a decision quickly. The user was almost persuaded to re-format the RAID (a total of 56 hard disks) and start from scratch.
Fortunately, we convinced 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 we are able to achieve. Against all the odds, we came up trumps, and the user was up and running in a week.
DIY data recovery is 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 professionals.
