We have been working hard on our list of the Top 10 Data Disasters. We gathered the best stories from our offices around the globe, or I should say the worst stories? Our engineers work all year long to perform amazing recoveries from media damaged beyond belief. We, as a society, have become very dependent on our data (Do you remember the last time you had to memorize a phone number?). Our company is proud to help save businesses and rebuild memories on a daily basis. The Top 10 Data Disasters of 2013 are just 10 examples of amazing recoveries we performed in 2013.

Data Disaster Hall of Fame

Kroll Ontrack has been performing data recoveries for over 25 years. Throughout our years, we have seen so many data disasters that it is difficult to decide which ones belong at the top of our list. We started publishing our annual list of Top 10 Data Disasters back in 2003. This year, in addition to our Top 10 Data Disasters of 2013 , we have a “Data Disaster Hall of Fame” with the top data disasters of all time. Now you have opportunity to vote on which disaster you think is the best. Ride the elevator through time and vote for your favorite via social media.

Businesses and individual users are jumping onto the cloud storage bandwagon at unprecedented rates – it is a great way to benefit from world-class technology services without being tied to a dedicated computing infrastructure.

While cloud storage can be a lot more convenient for most users, hardware is still at the root of this technology so it is not exempt from data loss scenarios – cloud data is consolidated and stored on physical servers and things can go wrong, just like any other storage technology.

This is something that Accius, a developer of custom energy and trading software for global corporations, found out the hard way.

Accius: The Data Loss Scenario

When the Accius development server became unresponsive and failed to re-boot, Accius started the process of ‘disassembling’ the virtual machine to prepare for launching a new development server. However, a software engineer forcibly detached one of the virtual storage volumes from the unresponsive server – that’s pretty much the same thing as pulling a cable out of an operational volume. When the volume was re-connected to a Windows host it was found to be corrupt.

Accius President Douglas Moore said “Time was business critical and recreating or re-building the development environment would have added an additional two or three days to the project – time we didn’t have.” And so Accius contact Kroll Ontrack for our professional data recovery services.

Kroll Ontrack to the Rescue

When Douglas Moore contact Kroll Ontrack he was quickly connected to a data recovery engineer who conducted a free hour long consultation to assess the data loss situation, considering such factors as how the data was stored, the technology and type of data involved and how the client thought that the data loss had occurred.

Due to time factors, it was decided that the quickest data recovery service option to use was the Ontrack Remote Data Recovery service - this allowed a Kroll engineer to connect to Accius quickly and to repair the damaged cloud storage volume and recover the critical data using our propriety Ontrack Remote Data Recovery process and software.

Successful Data Recovery

Unless the drive is physically or electronically failing, then Kroll Ontrack can connect to the drive using a secure internet connection and perform a lab-quality data recovery, thereby ensuring the same level of quality, satisfaction and customer service. This is exactly what we did for Accius’ virtual cloud system – Kroll Ontrack were able to recover the data, repair the damaged cloud storage volume and get the project up and running in two hours. The damaged volume was repaired and was accessible immediately upon completion of the data recovery, all within four hours of the data loss occurring.

“Kroll Ontrack responded quickly to our call for help and also understood that we needed to restore the data quickly to safeguard Accius’ reputation. Kroll Ontrack really understands the data recovery business and as one of only a few companies with the expertise to recover data from the cloud, Kroll Ontrack will be our first port of call should we require their services in the future.”

Accius: The Future

Accius is investigating ways to improve their cloud development processes to reflect the change to their IT infrastructure as a result of using cloud-based servers. Virtual systems have to be treated with the same care as SAN or physical hard disks. The data loss has also been a learning experience for Accius’ staff who now understand that cloud computing resources are susceptible to real types of failures. The potential for human error to cause data loss is still present in the cloud.

Pinning down the different types of data loss scenarios with your cloud provider before you commit to their storage solution can be valuable in preventing or addressing issues – Accius are just one of several organisations the Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery have helped who have experienced data loss in the cloud. Contact us on 0508 872 259 today for more information about our server data recovery, cloud data recovery or Ontrack Remote Data Recovery services.

Kroll Ontrack have started to see an increase in the number of Apple devices being sent to us for file recovery purposes over the past couple of years – iPhones, iPads, iMacs, iPods, the lot.

We’ve had huge success over the years recovering data from water, fire, smoke and physically damaged hard drives, but recovering data from Apple devices is a whole new adventure because Mac products tend to favour Solid State Drives (SSDs) which present a unique set of challenges for our data recovery experts.

One of the most common scenarios that we see for Apple devices is the water-logged iPhone. Despite the fact that it is a well-known fact that electricity and water don’t mix, this doesn’t seem to stop the mobile devices from taking a dip – in pools, in sinks, in ponds, in beer and in toilets – we’ve seen the lot.

Recovering data from a water-logged iPhone can be a demanding job, but it is possible.

First our engineers will need to strip down the iPhone or iPad and clean it, removing as much corrosion as possible and testing the electrical components see if any data can be salvaged from the unfortunate device. It is inevitable that we will need to replace some components – the battery will almost certainly be unusable, and we will need to thoroughly inspect the electronics in the device to assess the damage caused by the water infiltration.

iPhones aren’t the only Apple devices that Kroll Ontrack have been seeing an increase in – with more and more people choosing to replace a home computers with a smaller, more compact and convenient iPad or tablet, it is no wonder that we have been seeing more and more iPads that have experienced water damage, smashed screens, corrupt files, fire damage or problems with the iOS that are preventing access to files. While iPads and tablets are a relatively new field, we do have the tools and expertise required to attempt these difficult jobs.

Watch the video below to see how we went about recovering data from an iPad that was damaged in a plane crash.

Kroll Ontrack are Certified Apple Technicians, which allows us to unseal their hard disks for data recovery purposes without voiding the manufacturer’s warranty. We also have special tools available that allow us to interpret the data of any iOS backup file and transfer it to another device – this means that if you have an iPhone backup that you want to transfer to an Android phone then Kroll Ontrack can make that happen for you.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding Solid State Drives (SSDs) and how they differ to traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). In the first instalment of ‘Fact or Fiction’ we aim to clear up some of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding this increasingly popular storage utility.

1. Fact or Fiction: Lost or damaged data cannot be recovered from an SSD.

Fiction. Data can most certainly be recovered from an SSD, however it can be a much more complicated process due to a couple of factors:

• A lack of industry standards: There are only a small handful of manufacturers producing the chips that go inside an SSD, but there are over 200 manufacturers producing and selling SSDs. This is because they are easy to build (controller, chip, firmware…) and the technology is still relatively new, so there are no solid industry standards in place. This means that no two manufacturer’s SSD product is the same - difficulty recovering data is encounted when manufacturers use different controllers as each controller creates its own pattern/map of the data. The only was to recreate it is to reverse engineer this pattern manually and extract the data.
• Encryption – Encryption significantly reduces the recoverability of data if the SDD is accidentally reformatted, and using full disk encryption only compounds this problem. If the failure causes damage to the encryption disk and this prevents the disk from mounting then this prevents data from being decrypted. It also means that for badly damaged disks, a partial or targeted recovery cannot be attempted as the location of the important data cannot be identified – it is an ‘all-or-nothing’ recovery.

Despite these two inhibiting factors, Kroll Ontrack’s research and development team have created several advanced propriety tools and techniques that allow our data recovery engineers to recover files from SSD devices that have been plagued by physical damage or operating failures.

2. Fact or Fiction: A lack of moving parts makes SSDs more durable.

Fact. The lack of moving parts makes solid state storage more reliable than traditional HDDs.

That being said, SSDs are most commonly installed in mobile devices, which are subject to much harsher environmental conditions than most traditional HDD applications. The most common cause of solid state device failure that Kroll Ontrack sees is by water which causes electrical short circuits and damage to the electrical components.

3. Fact or Fiction: The life expectancy of SSDs reduces over time.

Fact. The life expectancy and capacity of all media reduces over time, and SSDs are no exception. A design phenomenon known as ‘Write Amplification’ causes the capacity and the speed of the SSD to reduce over time – this is due to the fundamental way that the SSD erases data from memory. The useful life expectancy of an SSD could be as little as five years under heavy use – most people upgrade their hardware every three years, so this should not be a problem unless you are buying your hardware second hand.

4. Fact or Fiction: Data corruption risks in SSDs are minimal

Fiction. When removing your SSD device from your computer, it is imperative to disconnect the device safely. Removing the power while the SSD is reading or writing data requires the SSD to shut down into a safe state within milliseconds not to lose any data. To expect the SSD to shut down this quickly every time without fail is a lot to ask and occasionally data corruption occurs and the user losses access to their files as a result.

The author of the review, Edward Mendelson made the following comments about our professions DIY data recovery software:

“Anyone who manages multiple computers and valuable data should have it ready in their software toolkit.”

“I was especially impressed by Ontrack’s speed, which far outclassed the competition when recovering data from a USB key or camera card.”

“Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional is the program I’ll run first when I need to recover lost files, and it ranks as PCMag’s clear Editors’ Choice for data recovery apps.”

Click Here to read the full article on PCMag.com, or visit our Ontrack EasyRecovery page for more information about our DIY file recovery software.

Plains FM 96.9 – NZ On Air

Programme: Mornings – Your Canterbury Connection
Date: April 22 2013

Graham Love of Computer Troubleshooters discusses the backup survey that Kroll Ontrack recently conducted and the importance of regular backups, as well checking automatic backups regularly to ensure that they are actually working and are monitored.

Read more about the survey results on the Kroll Ontrack Australia website.

Graham also discusses online backups and cloud backups and how they work.

Listen to the podcast online or click here to download the mp3 version.