When a hard drive has suffered physical damage – whether due to a fall, electrical surge, mechanical failure or anything else – it does not necessarily mean that the data that you have stored on it is lost forever. Yes, it’s possible that the damage is so severe that your data is beyond retrieval but this is a lot less likely than you may think. If your hard drive has suffered physical damage, what you do after you’v...
Whilst we and many other commentators persistently advocate the importance of people and businesses regularly backing up their data in order to avoid damaging data loss, research consistently shows that most people are still failing to do so. Perhaps this stems from so many of us being blissfully unaware of the fact that storage media can and does fail? It could be because we’ve never considered just how valuable our...
We’re creating data at a truly astonishing rate; in fact, the amount of digital data in existence is currently doubling every two years (a claim supported by the number of hard drive recoveries we've completed year-on-year).This, it is widely agreed, is simply not sustainable. Whilst this means that many of us are finding our various device are being filled to the brim with data, it’s worth remembering that the vast ...
Did you know that the amount of digital data stored in the world is doubling every two years? How about the fact that more than 90% of the data we store is only accessed and used within the three-month period that follows its creation? In short, chances are that most of us will either need to clear out our hard drives or invest in some extra storage at some point. Here then are our top tips for those that need to sto...
It’s one of those urban legends that simply refuses to die: ‘placing a failed hard in your freezer will make the drive functional for a short period of time thus allowing you to recover your data.’ Now, whilst this argument may be based partly on logic, it’s still not something we at Fields Data Recovery would recommend. Why? Because it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to work and is, in all probability, going to re...
At Fields Data Recovery, we regularly purchase second-hand hard drives for spare parts. Over the last few years, we’ve noticed that more and more of these devices still contain data created by their previous owners. Granted, the users have nearly always deleted their data and the problem is therefore caused by naivety rather than neglect, but this doesn’t change the fact that the personal information present on the d...
‘How much does it cost to recover data?’ is one of the most common questions Fields Data Recovery’s staff are asked. In fact, it’s likely that each individual public-facing member of staff is asked it at least once each day! Sadly, this is a question that cannot be answered with any reasonable degree of accuracy before an engineer has analysed the drive, diagnosed it and determined both the problem and solution. A qu...
With the weather getting warmer, many of us will be making a beeline for the beach. Our phones will inevitably go with us in order to capture that perfect family portrait or, possibly, a selfie with friends. Whilst the reasons for taking our phones to the beach are obvious, it’s not a particularly tech-friendly environment. Sand can clog up small entry points, mobile devices don’t usually like the heat and last but b...
As you can imagine, data recovery companies receive multiple drives – and therefore a truly enormous amount of data – on a daily basis. A significant portion of this data could be described as personal and/or sensitive. This is precisely why any company that deals in the act of recovering data from failed hard drives, phones, PCs etc. must adhere to the data protection act (soon to be replaced by the GDPR) and ensure...
We’ve recently written about how SSDs work and how, due to their lack of moving parts, they are far less likely to suffer from mechanical faults than HDDs as well as offer faster read/write speeds.Lower costs aside, it would seem that HDDs have no real advantages over flash-based media, but this is not entirely true: as the cells of devices that utilise flash technology can only be adjusted (to either prevent or allo...