Data Recovery

Several times recently I have been called upon to retrieve data from a crashed computer. To the normal user the data appears to be irretrievable and they are often told that this is the case. I have worked with clients where such material is either difficult for the client to recreate (in the case of school projects or a music collection) or impossible, such as a unique collection of 140GB of wildlife photographs. Retrieving data can be a challenge but is often achievable.

Magazine Data

Recently Ian Goldsworthy, the publisher of a magazine Elite , called me saying that much of the data for the October issue of Elite was on a computer which had crashed and couldn't be restarted.

A so called "expert" had told Ian that nothing could be retrieved so Ian called me for a second opinion. I determined quite quickly that most of the data looked visible and I thought that there was a better than 50% chance of getting most of it back.

Over night I was able to repair the disk, even though it initially crashed any system it was attached to, and make a copy of all of the data.

It transpired that the system would start with the repaired disk and a few checks later I returned it to Ian who was over the moon to have it all working again. However, it was obvious that the system was on borrowed time and needed replacing sooner rather than later so a new system was ordered and when it arrived all of the data was transferred successfully.

A more reliable backup strategy is also in place.

Wildlife Photographs

Finding that my client had 140GB of irreplaceable, and not backed up, photographs was a bit of a surprise. Getting them off proved to be quite difficult. The disk had some corruption. Not so much that the images were compromised but enough to make retrieving them difficult.

Eventually I was able to copy the images to an external 320GB disk which took several hours. The original disk was formatted and relegated to the role of backup. A new 320GB disk was installed with two partitions one quite small for the Operating System, and everything else (40GB), and one large partition for the images.

The machine now had three disks (two internal and one external) with a total capacity of 900GB and three copies of all of the photographs.

Disk space is so cheap now that adding extra disks is the only affordable and practical way to backup so much data.

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