August 13th, 2010
Toronto GTA, Ontario, Canada. Data recovery from laptops, notebooks and netbooks is not that much different then recovering data from desktop systems. The most noticeable difference lies in the size of the storage device or hard disk drive being used by each computer. Most modern desktop computer systems uses a larger 3.5” HDD or hard disc drive while a typical laptop or notebook style computer will use a smaller 2.5” HDD. Additionally many newer notebooks and netbooks are starting to use SSD or Solid State Drives. This discussion will focus solely on hard drives.
While most people assume it’s tougher to recover data from a smaller 2.5” laptop hard drive versus the 3.5” desktop drive, it is actually the opposite in most circumstances. When data is lost due to a physical or mechanical issue with a hard drive, our historical statistics clearly show that 2.5” laptop or notebook hard drive owners have an almost 10% better chance of seeing their data again versus 3.5” desktop drives owners. In my previous life at another recovery company, this same statistic also held true. Hmm … seems strange, especially when I see some data recovery service companies adding a surcharge for dealing with laptop hard drives.
So why are we more successful with 2.5” hard drive recoveries? First 2.5” hard drives sustain less damage when they do crash and second they are more accepting of standard data recovery procedures.
Laptops, notebooks, netbooks AND 2.5” hard drives are designed to take more physical abuse then your typical desktop computer or hard drive. By design and virtue of their tiny mass, 2.5” hard drives can absorb anywhere from 3-5 times as much shock as a typical desktop drive. Portable computers also use shock absorbing mounting brackets to further isolate the hard drive from any external bumps or drops. These damage saving features decrease the severity of damage due to crashes.
Laptop and other portable computer manufactures are also concerned with decreasing the energy consumption and heat dissipation of their products. Fortunately, both of these pursuits provide additional benefits for preserving your data. For example, most laptops save energy by spinning down the hard drive when the laptop is not used for a predetermined period of time. And because hard drives are much more susceptible to damage when they are spinning, this energy saving feature can really save data. 2.5” laptop hard drives take it even a step further and use ramps to lift the heads physically off the disk surface when the drive is spun down while many 3.5” hard drives continue to land the heads on the surface of the disks or platters. Once again an energy saving feature that helps prevent damage to the disk. And there is also some validity in the argument that saving energy creates less heat which in turn causes less drive failures.
Laptop, notebooks and netbook drives are also much more tolerant of data recovery techniques. Head xplants or the process of replacing a bad head assembly with a good head assembly is one of the more commonly used data recovery techniques, but because each hard drive’s head assembly is ever so slightly different and the hard drives electronics were tuned to work specifically with the original head assembly, xplants are often not successful. However this procedure is much more successful when attempted between two 2.5” hard drives versus between two 3.5” hard drives.
Because 2.5” hard drives are principally used in portable devices that by definition will operated while the user is mobile, they are designed to deal with harsher conditions and recover from a larger range of off track data situations then a typical 3.5” hard drive. Consequently they are more accepting of new heads with their slight differences. You can compare it to a racing car and a jeep. The racing care is tuned for high performance and is capable of going very fast and taking corners at incredible speeds as long as the road is smooth. But when the road turns too dirt and mud the racing car gets stuck. On the other hand, the jeep may not go as fast but when the road gets rough, it’ll keep on going.
Media damage, whether disk or platter damage, head crashes, or rings forming on the disk are always a problem. And once again, we find 2.5” hard drives are just more tolerant of damage. As a method of preventing damage in the first place, 2.5” hard drives fly the heads at a greater height above the disks then 3.5” hard drives. This allows a laptop or notebook drive to take more physical abuse or impact without having it’s heads coming into contact with the disk surfaces. This design also allows them to float above damage that would impede the positioning or even damage the heads of a typical 3.5” hard drive and thus giving us a much better chance of recovering data.
So even though your laptop hard disk drive may be smaller then it’s big brother the desktop drive, it’s still the leader in data loss prevention and the better drive to be using should you ever need the services of a professional data recovery company, like Memofix Data Recovery Services. http://memofixdatarecovery.com/
… David Foster
Tags: 2.5" hard drive recovery, data from laptop, data recovery hard drive, data recovery harddrive, data recovery toronto, dropped laptop, hard drive data recovery, hard drive recovery, hard drive repair, laptop data recovery, lost laptop data, need laptop files, netbook data recovery, notebook data recovery, recover data, recover drive data, recover hard drive, recover hard drive data, toronto data recovery
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July 8th, 2010
Toronto GTA, Ontario, Canada. Recovering data remotely is a service presently being offered by several of the larger data recovery companies. It sounds so convenient, no shipping, no computer disassembly, no risk, just call someone up and they remotely connect to my computer, and “poof” my data is restored. If only it were so simple. In reality it’s much more of a marketing ploy then a realistic recovery option. The complexities and dangers of offering remote service seem to counter the very pillars of data safety.
First you must consider that for a remote data recovery service to be successful the hard drive must be functioning properly; otherwise there is a serious risk of causing further damage. If the drive has physical problems and is beginning to fail, there may only a short window before the damage becomes insurmountable. As every data recovery company will advise, if the data is important, shut it off immediately and do nothing. So unless you’re knowledgeable enough to determine the condition of your hard drive or you don’t mind a 50/50 chance of doing further damage you may want to reconsider a remote data recovery service.
Furthermore, this service requires the user to have some technical computer skills as the original hard drive must be removed and installed in a second web attached computer along with possibly an additional hard drive to copy the recovered data to. Some assistance will also be required to setup and establish the remote link. And while some users may feel comfortable with these tasks, the real concern is with the increased risk of causing further damage whether due to physical handling, static shock, or the unintended running of automatic drive utilities like chkdsk.
It is our policy and that of most other professional data recovery services to create an exact image or mirror of the original drive. The original drive is then put away for safe keeping, while any alterations to the file system structures or running of utilities are completed on a copy of the copy. In a remote data recovery situation, you do not have the luxury of having a backup copy in case things go wrong.
We also see many cases of apparent file structure damage where the storage device or hard drive initially appears to be operating fine but as we attempt to image it we discover read errors or the drive starts failing in some other way. In instances like this there is a strong chance the file structure damage was actually caused by the physical issue. Attempting to recover data from a drive like this will just aggravate the situation and risk further damage to the storage device or filesystem.
In my past life, I worked for one of the larger data recovery companies that considered offering a remote recovery option. At the time we had multiple lab locations across the USA and we were already using remote connections to share the data recovery expertise spread throughout our different labs. Our more senior data recovery engineers essentially used remote access to evaluate and direct a more junior tech in how to proceed with a difficult data recovery. Prior to us offering the service to the general public, we investigated our competitors offering by conducting a secret shopper campaign where we attempted to engage their remote data recovery services. Surprisingly, we were repeatedly met with opposition when we requested a remote recovery. They tried to sell us data recovery software, followed by in-lab service before reluctantly agreeing to only attempt a remote recovery IF we approved a minimum of $1500 for the recovery if successful. And this was without ever looking at the media. It’s readily apparent that the entire concept was being used to get you to call them so they could then attempt to try and talk you into shipping the case to their lab.
Remote data recovery has most of same limitations and capabilities as that of a good data recovery software program. The drive must be functional and it must be connected to a working computer system. In many situations a data recovery program will perform as good as a remote recovery service. In fact, the remote recovery tech is more then likely going to be running utilities as part of the effort to salvage your data. So why pay for someone to hook up remotely and run utilities on your system. You can do that yourself and with less complications and time wasted establishing a safe connection.
There are a few occasions where remote data recovery does makes sense, where due to the isolation of the location there is no other option, but for those cases that can be delivered to a full service data recovery lab you would be very unwise not to take advantage of the hands on experience of a data recovery specialist. http://memofixdatarecovery.com/ … David Foster
Tags: crashed computer, crashed hard drive, data recovery toronto, deleted data files, dropped laptop, gta data recovery, laptop data recovery, lost pictures, lost pst file, MAC data recovery, maxtor hard drive recovery, NAS data recovery, ntfs file recovery, RAID recovery Toronto, remote data recovery, seagate data recovery, server data recovery, Toronto gta data recovery
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June 22nd, 2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hard drive manufactures provide a warranty on their disk drives that will provide you with a new drive should yours happen to fail within the warranty period. However, none of these warranties can protect or replace your data should it become inaccessible or lost as a result of a failing hard drive or accidental damage. And in fact, the drive manufactures go out of their way to distance themselves as far away as possible from any liability for the data that is stored on their product. So why hasn’t someone offered insurance on the data that resides on your hard drive or other digital storage device. Simply put, it isn’t possible! Data is not always recoverable, no matter how much money one is willing to pay.
A few companies have attempted to sell “data recovery” type insurance but none would ever be so bold as to guarantee your data. Instead the few twisted souls that have ventured into the data recovery insurance game have chosen to repackage a similar type of insurance under the name of a data protection service.
About 5 years ago one of the laptop hard drive manufactures partnered with a data recovery company in offering this type of insurance. In such a plan, you are charged a small premium to cover the cost of “attempting” to recover your data should such a disaster befall you. There are no guarantees they will recover your data, only a promise to give it their best efforts. And if they’re not successful, there are no pay outs or compensation of any sort, other than possibly offering to insure your new replacement drive for free. Personally, I fail to see any incentive for the underlying data recovery company to give it much of an effort or expend any serious resources.
Many of us already have a home owner’s insurance policy that may provide coverage for data recovery services should you lose the PERSONAL data on your home computer. I was surprised to see my policy covers such losses up to $1500. Unfortunately there was a $500 deductible but at least I am covered for a serious recovery attempt at a relatively low recovery cost. You may want to check your policy or ask your insurance agent if you have coverage.
There is one external hard drive manufacture that I don’t have much experience with, but who does offer data recovery insurance on their products as a standard offering. The company is ioSafe https://iosafe.com/2-TB-solo-external-hard-drive and they specialize in manufacturing disaster proof external hard drives. Protecting your data is what their products are all about and guaranteeing them with a warranty to cover up to a $1000 of data recovery services should make you take them seriously.
I also remember working at ActionFront Data Recovery Labs in the early 2000s and we provided the recovery services to support a data recovery warranty for Belkin surge suppressors. Basically if you lost your data as a result of their product failing to protect your hard drive they would pay for the cost of recovering your data. There were no limits as I recall and the plan was based on our best efforts. We didn’t get paid unless we were successful so the client really did get a 1st rate recovery attempt.
While any item can be insured for cash compensation should that item be destroyed or lost, there are some things that just can’t be replaced with cash and perhaps your data is one of them. There are no guarantees that your data can be recovered so do what you can to prevent a data disaster in the first place. Protecting your data isn’t expensive, it’s priceless! … David Foster
Tags: data insurance, data recovery, data recovery insurance, data recovery service, data recovery toronto, data recovery warranty, toronto data recovery, Toronto gta data recovery
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June 9th, 2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’ve had the misfortune to experience a data loss situation, whether because you accidentally dropped your laptop, your brother-in- law insisted on reformatting your hard drive or perhaps a passing lightning storm drove a voltage spike through the heart of your system, then you know getting your data recovered is just the first step in getting your computer back in order.
In recovery cases where the original hard drive was found to be defective, it will need to be replaced with a new drive. In cases where the only problem was a LOGICAL issue, you may be able to re-use the original hard drive, BUT we do not recommend this as some logical problems may be the result of intermittent problems with your hard drive. Regardless of your situation, once a reliable storage device has been physically installed in your computer, you need to install & configure the operating system and install all the various programs or applications you may use. In most cases you will require the original licensed installation diskette(s), CD/DVD(s) or USB flash stick.
Once you have your system setup and bootable, the storage device with the recovered data (typically a USB external hard drive) can be attached to the new system. Identifying where to locate and copy the recovered data to is determined by the operating system and what your original username was.
For example, in Windows XP there is a folder in the root directory or top level folder called “Documents and Settings”. Within the “Documents and Settings” folder you will see a folder named for each user set up to use the system. There will be folders with names like “Administrator” and “All Users”. Among these folders you should also see a folder with the same name as your previous login name. So if you previously logged in as JoeUser you should see a folder called “JoeUser”. This is the default location for storing all your personal data. Some advanced users may have chosen a non-default location for some of their data files but such users should not require this article to reintegrate their data. Once inside your personal “JoeUser” folder, you will see some standard data folders with names such as “Desktop”, “MyDocuments”, MyPictures”, and “MyFavorites” . If you were to open the “Desktop” folder you should see all the items that were previously on your desktop. To copy this folder to your new system so your desktop looks just like it was before, simply drag and drop the “Documents and Settings/JoeUser/ Desktop” folder into the “Documents and Settings/JoeUser” folder on the new system. The new system will prompt you for permission to overwrite the “Desktop” folder and once approved your data will be copied. Repeat this procedure for each additional folder you may wish to copy. By default much of your data will be stored in the “MyDocuments” folder.
If you use Outlook for your email under Windows XP, you can find your .pst data files in the default \Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\ folder. In Vista or Windows 7 the default is \Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\.
The default location for storing your data in Windows Vista or Windows 2007 is very similar except the “Documents & Settings” folder has been renamed to “Users”. So if your login name was JoeUser, your data would be located in the “Users/JoeUser” folder. It’s interesting that this also happens to be the location of your data files on a Apple or MAC system. Apple also uses a top level folder called Users which contains a folder named for each user and within each user folder you will find that user’s data. Drag and drop the data folders into the same locations on your MAC drive and you’re done.
… David Foster
Tags: data recovery, deleted files, dropped hard drive, dropped laptop, file system reinstalled, gta data recovery, laptop data recovery, laptop recovery, lost data, RAID data recovery, RAID failure, reformatted, server data recovery, server recovery, toronto data recovery
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May 27th, 2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We are constantly reminded by our clients of just how expensive data recovery can be. No matter how much we attempt to prepare clients, many are still outright shocked at the cost. I can sympathize with many of our clients as I’ve experienced the same sensation at least a few times over the last year; like when I brought my car in for a simple brake job and the bill surged to almost a $1000; or when my furnace started making knocking noises and I was quoted over $1200 for a new blower motor. So what makes data recovery so expensive ….. or is it?
Just as your local auto service would not charge you the same price for an oil change as they would for a new exhaust system, Data Recovery pricing varies greatly. Some recoveries may take 20 minutes to resolve, while others can be on-going for a week or longer. Some problems can be handled by a junior data recovery technician, while others may require our resident genius to step in. Data loss may be the result of the accidental deletion of a few files, the dropping of a laptop or the failure of multiple hard drives from a 12 drive RAID array. Obviously the skill set and resources required to bring a crashed hard drive back to life or to reconstruct a damaged RAID array are much greater than the expertise required recovering a few deleted files.
Data Recovery is a service business with no guarantees. Sometime the data is just not recoverable no matter how much effort and parts we throw at it. And of course nobody likes to pay you for NOT recovering their data. So most reputable data recovery companies have adopted a somewhat unique service guarantee, where if we cannot recover the data you need, you will not be charged a dime. Consequently when data recovery jobs are quoted, the odds of us being able to recover the data successfully are built into the equation. In other words if we estimate the odds of a successful recovery are only 10%, then the recovery case will be quoted quite high. Looking at it slightly differently, if we attempt 10 such cases, we will be successful and get paid for just one of them. On the other hand, if our experience determines a recovery case is recoverable in 99% of the time, than the cost may be quite reasonable as there will be no risk factor built in.
What is you data worth? The most expensive data recovery I’ve been involved in was from a large world class hospital in one of the southern U.S. states. The hospital had been downloading all of its medical images, from ultrasounds to MRIs, to one server that was supposedly being backed up every night. When the server’s RAID array crashed one rainy night, they quickly learned their backup tapes were useless. The cost to re-book and recreate the over 200,000 images would have been in the millions of dollars, and many of them could never be replicated as the patients condition had changed. The job took us 3 months with a team of 4 techs and we ended up charging somewhere just over a $100K. And imagine this: we actually LOST money on it!
Providing a thorough and world class recovery service demands an investment in high end people and expensive equipment. Yes we could do data recovery cheaper like many on the web that scoop off the easiest cases and declare the rest unrecoverable (a real crime and disservice to everyone). Or we could charge ridiculous pricing like the big boys of the industry. But, doing just the easy cases so we are super profitable, or quoting everything super high so that when we do get an approval we make big money, is NOT our philosophy. We want to provide every client with the best chance of getting their data back and at a reasonable cost. Reasonable must mean we are able to be profitable enough to stay in the business and profitable enough to continue to invest in our people, our equipment and our processes. We have consciously set our pricing to be somewhere between these two extremes. http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-pricing.php
So, if you find yourself in need of a data recovery service, please take the time to consider the value of your data. If it’s not worth much, go ahead and take a chance on a cheap fly by night recovery service or call you geeky brother-in-law Stan. But if you or your company can’t live without your data, don’t waste the first and best chance of a successful recovery with anyone but a professional recovery service like Memofix. … David Foster
Tags: crashed hard drive, data loss, data recovery, data recovery pricing, dropped laptop, hard drive data recovery, lost my data, RAID data recovery, RAID recovery, Toronto data recovery services
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March 4th, 2010
Claremont, Ontario, Canada. At least every week we receive a few recoveries where the drive will not spin up. The problem is a physical issue where the spindle motor that spins the hard drive’s platters is seized. The cost of recovering from such a situation is quite expensive, but it may be possible to avoid such a dilemma.
Manufactures design external enclosures that mount the drive either vertically or horizontally as shown in the picture below. Due to the high centre of gravity with the vertical units, they are extremely susceptible to being knocked over, which in turn may cause your hard drive’s spindle to seize. Avoid buying one of these vertically mounted external hard drive enclosure if at all possible.
Vertically mounted (SUV) Horizontally mounted (Porsche)
While it’s true hard drives are designed to be mounted either vertically or horizontally, they are not designed to withstand much shock while operating. Approximately 10 years ago when hard drives were still designed with standard ball bearings in their spindle motors, they rarely seized. But in the quest for better performance, drives began using fluid dynamic bearings. With FD bearings, the metal balls were replaced with a layer of liquid. While there is no doubt that these bearings were superior in performance, they do have the disadvantage that under shock situations the fluid dynamic bearings can catastrophically seize. And that is what we are seeing so much of today. http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-hard-drive.php … David Foster
Tags: crashed hard drive, data loss, data recovery blog, data recovery experts, dropped hard drive, external hard drive enclosures, free agent problem, gta data recovery, hard drive doesn't spin, seized spindle motor, toronto data recovery
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February 26th, 2010
Markham, Ontario, Canada. This is a story I love to tell. It reveals much of the human psyche and I find it fascinating
Back in the 90’s when Data Recovery type services were first starting to mature I was working for one of the pioneers of the industry, Nick Majors. Nick was a man of unquestionable integrity and honesty. So it was no surprise that nothing perturbed him more at the time than the massive influx of companies that suddenly “claimed” to be experts in data recovery. From cases that were sent to us for a 2nd opinion and through our own secret shopper program, where we sent data recovery cases to these so called experts, it became obvious that there were a lot of unscrupulous and opportunistic villains infecting the data recovery business. They made their money by getting in as many jobs as they could, charging an evaluation fee for each one, and then recovering the 10-15% of the cases that were the easiest (skimming the cream off the top as we referred to it back then) . They would do the cases where no parts and little intelligence were required … basically the cases that could easily be handled by any commercially available recovery software. Those they couldn’t recover were declared unrecoverable and the client was told they were out of luck.
So it was decided that we had a responsibility to save the world’s data from all these crooks and make some money off it at the same time. With huge fanfare and press releases, we announced our FREE-FIX program. Basically, we would recover people’s data for free IF it was a simple problem that we could resolve in 15 minutes or less. This would include logical problems with the file system, deleted files, formatted drives and pcb problems for common drives we had in stock. The program was intended for consumer users and was available on single hard drives with Windows or MAC data only. If we were successful, the client only paid for the return shipping and the media to put the data on. If the case was not eligible for FREE-FIX, we would provide the client with a no obligation quote for further recovery attempts.
We thought if we took the high road and did the easy stuff for free, we would kill this growing segment of con artists as they would not be able to survive without the easy jobs. And of course we also hoped that many of the ineligible cases would be approved for escalation into more desirable expensive jobs. We really felt that we would gain such a good reputation from this program that it would pay us back a thousand times.
Boy, were we wrong !!!! Yes most of the owners of the cases that qualified for FREE-FIX loved us. But the other 85% of the people were absolutely outraged at us. We were suddenly bombarded with irate clients wanting to rip a strip off of us. Those that we tried to “up-sell” because theirs’ was not a simple/free recovery, largely declined as they felt we were using bait and switch tactics. Even some of the 100 or so people who qualified for FREE-FIX every month thought we must be making money off the return media and the shipping. Shortly after the 1st month, the FREE-FIX experiment was cancelled and quickly disappeared into the growing mist of the World Wide Web, never to be heard of again. … David Foster
Tags: cheap data recovery, concord data recovery, crashed computer, crashed hard drive, data loss, data loss toronto, data recovery experts, Free Data Recovery, FREE-FIX, gta data recovery, lost data toronto, Nick Majors, RAID recovery, reformatted data, richmond hill data recovery, server problems, toronto data recovery, vaughnan data recovery
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January 25th, 2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’ve spent any time on the various data recovery websites you’ve no doubt come across lots of advice on what to do once you have a data loss situation. But I’ve always felt the best advice would be to avoid such an unpleasant experience in the 1st place. So after some interesting discussions with our data recovery technicians, we have created a list of useful tips and suggestions that may keep you from losing your data in the first place.
1. Start by choosing the safest storage device you can. Here are some specific recommendations that may help …
• Don’t buy the latest and greatest hard drive. Stick with a true and tested hard drive model that has been around a while. Not only will the bad models have been discontinued, but any bugs or known issues on seasoned models, will have been addressed. Search the web to discover problems other users may be having with a specific drive model.
• Don’t use an old hard drive. If your drive is older than 5 years consider replacing it. And no matter how old your drive is, if it starts acting up in any way, whether making a strange noise once in a while or whether read errors keep popping up, get rid of it, before it fails.
• Buy the lightest hard drive you can! Huh? Preferably one with a single disk. Sounds strange you say? Less mass requires less power = less heat & less stress combined with less parts = less crashes. When a drive manufacture requires 4 disks to keep up with the competition until their latest technical innovations reach the marketplace, you know they’re likely stretching the design limitations.
• Consider using a laptop drive in your desktop. Laptop drives by design are meant to take more physical abuse and are designed to be light in weight, low in power needs and quiet in operation.
• If you’re using an SSD or Solid State Drive, ensure you always backup. SSD drives use extremely complicated and always proprietary methods of distributing the data across multiple memory chips. The point is, if your SSD becomes damaged, recovering your data may be very very very expensive … if it is even possible. I also wonder how an SSD will stand up to a power surge. If a hard drive gets a power surge the electronics get fried but the physically stored data remains intact. In an SSD, fried electronics could very well be your critical data disappearing into the cosmos.
2. Then maintain and protect your storage device or hard drive with these suggestions
• Connect your computer to a UPS or surge suppressor. This simple device can prevent electrical surge damage to your drive as well as preventing damage to any open files or the file system itself should your power source be interrupted.
• Ensure your system has adequate ventilation. One of the most common causes of drive failure is overheating, so make sure your computer’s fans work or even consider adding an additional one.
• Use an antivirus program and keep updated with the latest virus definitions.
• Be gentle! A hard drive is a delicate device. Be sure it has a chance to stop spinning before attempting to move your desktop or laptop computer. And be extremely careful not to knock over any external hard drives you may have attached. Every week we see damaged external drives where the external case was merely tipped over while it was running.
3. And finally protect your data just in case bad things happen!
• Backup the important stuff! Yeah, yeah … we all know this and yet few of us do it, me included. If it’s important to you, prove it and back it up.
• Defrag often! If the data is contiguous (all stored sequentially together) there are ways to rip off data files even if the drive’s file system or “index of file locations” is totally missing. Be sure to use you computers defragmentation utility on a regular basis.
• Don’t encrypt your data, unless absolutely necessary. Even if you never forget the password, a failing hard drive combined with encryption means the odds of getting your data back are slim. If you must use encryption, use it only on individual files that must be guarded at no cost.
While very few of us can be 100% diligent in safeguarding our data at all times, hopefully a few of these tips will lower the chances of you losing data. But if all else fails and you find yourself in a data loss predicament, please give us a call. … David Foster http://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/protect-your-data.php
Tags: crashed hard drive, data loss, data recovery, file recovery, gta data recovery, hard drive data recovery, RAID recovery, RAID repair, tips to prevent data loss, Toronto data recovery services, Toronto gta data recovery
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January 6th, 2010
Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The beginning of a blog …
As this will be my 1st ever blog and my 1st entry, let me start by introducing myself and then providing a brief overview of what this blog will be about.
My name is David Foster and I’m in charge of the Memofix Data Recovery Lab. I’ve been in the data recovery business for over 20 years. In the late 1980s I started a company that repaired hard drives. But within 7 years as hard drives were becoming disposable items, we sold the business and I thought my hard learned skills may never be put to use again. But of course the real value was now in the data which was only accessible if the drive could be resurrected and I soon started as a data recovery technician at a small data recovery company in Toronto. These were the early days of data recovery companies and we “wrote the book” on data recovery in many ways. With an initial team of 10 employees this company grew very quickly and was soon considered the most technically capable data recovery company in the world. Along the way I became the VP of Lab Operations and we opened 7 fully functional data recovery labs including labs in Canada, the U.S. and the Netherlands. As all good things do, it came to an end and the company was bought by a large hard drive manufacturer.
About a year ago I found my way to a warm new home here at Memofix and have gotten myself nicely settled in. Memofix is a fantastic storage centric company managed by real people with real integrity and I have been tasked to revamp the data recovery division into a real force. Memofix has been doing data recovery for quite some time now, but has largely provided it as a service to their existing client base as a result of client requests. But now we are launching a new phase of data recovery services aimed at all of Canada. Our goal is to provide superior data recovery services at reasonable prices with outstanding customer service for all types of media and operating systems. I am extremely excited to be able to take my vision of what a superb quality service offering should be and mold Memofix Data Recovery Services into just such an elite service.
Over the next months and years you will see some big changes at Memofix and many you won’t. I’m sure I will use this blog to boast about many of them. But besides the opportunity to promote Memofix, I really hope to use this blog to educate folks in all areas of data recovery. I hope to explain some of the techniques we use, discuss operating systems and hard drives, give advise on do it yourself techniques, maybe gossip a little about industry players, just about anything to do with computers and data and storage and of course hard drives. Perhaps you have a topic or question you would like answered. My email is davidf@memofix.com and I welcome your feedback.
Tags: data recovery, data recovery blog, data recovery lab, David Foster, file recovery, gta data recovery, hard drive data recovery, hard drive experts, toronto data recovery
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