2009 The drive with glass platters
In April 2009 an external Iomega enclosure with a 500 GB Samsung HM500LI drive arrived at our service desk. The client had dropped it, along with important data.
When we opened the drive we saw what nobody wants to see: the platters broken into shards. This model uses glass platters, and they have no resistance to impact at all. Sadly, data cannot be recovered from a drive like that.
The lesson is simple: a portable drive is not a backup. A backup is a second copy.
Fact The drive that stopped bullets
Five shots from .45 and .38 calibre pistols were fired at a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80 GB drive. All five bullets hit, but none went through.
Drive housings are cast from tough metal, so a dead drive may still come in handy. Just not for data.
2006 A server you reboot by phone
When a server a hundred kilometres away hangs, someone has to drive there. In 2006 we started building our own answer, the GSM reloader, which reboots a remote server or router with a call from a mobile phone.
2007 Helping colleagues in Poland
After forming a data recovery group with MiP Data Recovery, our technicians helped solve the hardest cases in Poland. The organisations whose data was saved include FIAT Bank Polska, Computerland Polska, institutes of the Warsaw University of Technology and the Institute of High Pressure Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
2012 When RAID is not enough
A hosting company’s server with two drives in a RAID1 mirror ran flawlessly for four years. After a scheduled reboot the system would not start from either drive.
Ordinary recovery tools could see only some of the directories. In our laboratory, combining hardware and software recovery, all the data, the company’s and its clients’, was recovered within a few days.
