Kroll Ontrack’s new Data Recovery Cleanroom

In August 2012, Kroll Ontrack unveiled a new cleanroom facility in Brisbane, Queensland. The new cleanroom supports an increase in RAID, VMware and Apple device data recovery projects and also includes expanded tape recovery services, to address an extensive range of tape media assignments, including large tape conversion projects. The facility will accommodate growth over time and has been designed to reflect current best practices in cleanroom innovation. As new products are developed and new technology arises, the infrastructure of the built-space will support emerging solutions and products to efficiently service customer data recovery requests in a safe and secure environment.

: The Kroll Ontrack clean room facility is a secured environment with CCTV monitoring. All office staff and engineers are background checked. Kroll Ontrack follow strict IT security protocols and are audited every year. Currently we follow SAS70 certification.

: A large stock of spare parts and hard drives is important to ensure a fast recovery service. Kroll Ontrack maintains a World Wide Parts Database where engineers can search for parts. If for example the office in Germany has the set of parts for certain data recovery job, Brisbane lab can request that the parts be sent to them.

: Data recovery requires specialist skills and knowledge of the mechanical aspect of hard drives and data storage technologies. At the last count, Kroll Ontrack had over 500 proprietary software and hardware tools developed over the course of 25 years in the business of data recovery. With the daily release of new storage devices and new revisions of existing models, Kroll Ontrack has on hand 200 software and developers to write new code or design new tools to help clients recover data.

: Drives should only be opened in a suitable environment to avoid in repairable damage.

: Engineers can work on multiple drives in various stages of recovery. With proprietary imaging software, a drive can be imaged from the back to the front or from any point where it can avoid the damaged areas on the platters. Kroll Ontrack always work with an image of a drive and not on the original hard drive which ultimately preserves the drive to get the best quality recovery from it.

: Engineers work on different technologies, from traditional hard drives to solid state and flash memory. Kroll Ontrack work closely with many manufacturers and OEMs to develop tools for data recovery. These tools are developed, tested and rolled out to the global offices where the engineers are given training to use on client jobs. Typically it takes 2 years for an engineer to be complete their training on basic tools and techniques before specializing in areas of expertise within data recovery.

: Further inspection of hard drive heads is required to detect mechanical issues, alignment and find a solution for physical damage. The high powered microscopes are commonly used in medical laboratory research. Each one is custom modified to provide the precise requirements of aligning and spacing the head assembly on a hard drive. With some hard drives having up to eight read / write heads and four platters, it very important to make sure that no one head comes in contact with a platter!

: Imaged and recovered data is copied out to portable hard drives or other storage devices. Once and image is created from the failed hard drive, the job is passed to another team to recover the data files from the image held on the secure Kroll Ontrack server. As the data is copied out to new media, each file is validated to make sure it is of good quality and a report is generated so the client can check to see whether the most important data is present and is in good working order. In the case of RAIDs and SANs, the engineers can image each drive and rebuild the RAID or striping of data to recover the data, this is also true in the Hypervisor world where the majority of data loss is caused by human error.

: After the recovery process hard drives can be erased by an Ontrack Degausser to make sure no customer data resides on the hard drives. Before a drive is disposed of, it’s a good ideal to degauss it so there is no risk of it ever being recovered again. Back in the 90s there were enterprising students who would buy old computers from corporations, perform DIY data recovery and sell the drive on EBay. Only last year we saw media stories of e-waste being shipped to Africa and storage devices being targeted for credit card numbers and bank details. A click lasting less than a second pulses the hard drives with 18,000 degauss units making it totally unrecoverable. Kroll Ontrack can also provide a green service where the valuable rare earth metals can be recycled.

: The erasure process is monitored and certified by a Kroll Ontrack engineer.