The Process of Data Recovery

Data recovery starts with diagnosis, because hard drives fail for a number of reasons — both logical and mechanical. That is why we offer a free evaluation. Once it is complete, we can give you a quote for recovery and an estimate of how long the recovery is likely to take.

The price depends on the type of recovery needed, but there are basically two types. The most common is a Logical Recovery — recovery using specialized data recovery hardware and software. The second is a Physical Recovery — also known as a Clean Room Recovery or Mechanical Recovery — where we replace internal parts of the hard drive in a cleanroom before recovering the data.

Free evaluation

This is the first stage in the data recovery process. If we are assessing a hard drive, we test the circuit board for damage, then look at the firmware contained on the ROM chip and on the System Area of the drive to see if there is any failure or corruption preventing the data from being accessed. Among other things, we run a media test to determine how stable the read-write heads are, and we assess the level of corruption of the data itself. Imagine that your drive has been admitted to hospital with a mystery illness, and it's our job to run tests until we can diagnose the problem.

If we are evaluating a flash drive, we test the circuit board and USB connector for damage and check the communication between the controller and NAND memory chip. If we are evaluating a RAID array, we assess the condition of each of the drives to see which are causing the failure and determine which can be used for the recovery.

Logical failures

After we have approval to go ahead with the recovery, we begin the process of accessing the data. For a hard drive, this may mean replacing the circuit board, re-writing or rebuilding the drive's firmware, and then imaging the drive sector by sector. Each hard drive is made up of sectors of data. If any of those sectors have corrupted data, we can change the way our equipment accesses the data by using algorithms to solve reading issues.

A modern 1TB hard drive has almost 2 billion sectors, which is why data recovery can take a few days. We always produce an image of your drive so that we can work to recover and rebuild the data from the image and not directly from your drive — it's the only source of your data and it's already in an unstable condition, otherwise it would still be working. At Desert Data Recovery we use PC-3000 UDMA systems, which are state-of-the-art data recovery hardware and software combinations, commonly acknowledged in the industry as cutting edge in their ability to repair and recover data from hard drives.

Physical failures

If, during the evaluation, we find that the hard drive has a mechanical issue that prevents us from accessing data, then the drive is assessed in our Class 10 cleanroom. This is a dust-free environment where we can open the hard drive and replace damaged parts so that we can recover your data. As an example, the read/write heads within your drive ride above the platters (discs) on a bearing of air. This bearing of air is nanometers thick — that's billionths of a meter. Even a fingerprint or a smoke particle caught under the read/write heads would cause significant damage to the very delicate read-write heads. That's why we have invested in our cleanroom facility.

If we are looking at a physical recovery of a flash drive, we may have to repair the circuit board to access the data, or in extreme cases where the data cannot be accessed at all, we complete what's called a "chip off" recovery. This is where the NAND memory chip is removed from the flash drive circuit board and read in a chip reader. This allows us to access the data, although it is still usually encrypted, so we include decryption in the process.

Recovery & secure delivery

Once we have resolved all the issues and have access to your data, we send you a secure link to a list of the files we are able to recover from your drive, so that you can make sure your critical data is there. Once you have confirmed that you're happy with the recovered data, we save your data onto your target drive — such as an external hard drive if you have one, or a replacement flash drive in the case of flash media recovery. We also keep a copy of your data on file for 14 days, allowing you time to complete a backup, and as security just in case something happens to your data on your way home or back to work.