But I *CAN'T* Lose Those!

[clowninasack]

Apparently some people think I'm holding out on them when I tell them their hard drive is cooked and that they'll be lucky to get anything copied from it. This is really a mix of several customers since I get this so often.

Me: Holy snapping crap, it's me!
SC: You should know this by now...

Me: Unfortunately it appears that your hard drive is failing. We can attempt to recover data off of it, but you'll be lucky to get any data from the drive, and it can be quite expensive. You don't happen to have a backup do you?
SC: But I've got pictures of *suchandsuch* and me when we went to *suchandsuch place* and *other irreplacable stuff* on there and I didn't make a backup!
Me: Like I said we can try to recover data off the drive, but I cannot make any guarantees as to what we will be able to get off, and even if we get data off it could be corrupt. If you do not have a backup, I am sorry, but I cannot do anything more for you.
SC: But there must be something you can do!
Me: I realize you have important files on there, but there is nothing more I can do.

Or then there is the guy who does this:

Me: Unfortunately it appears that your hard drive is failing. We can attempt to recover data off of it, but you'll be lucky to get any data from the drive, and it can be quite expensive. You don't happen to have a backup do you?
SC: Okay, well try to get what you can.
Me: Okay, I'll get right to that!

*three hours later*

Me: Unfortunately I couldn't get anything off the drive.
SC: That's ok I have a backup!

At this point I usually pretend to strangle the phone because I just wasted three very tedious hours trying every trick in the book to get this guy's data back.

[WanderingSaint]

That's while all my important files are on two different computers, and the REALLY important stuff burnt on a disk every six months.

I haven't had a fail yet... but in case it happens... I'm okay.

You know what really bugs me though? On TV, whenever they say 'the hard drives been wiped!'... ' oh, but we can get it back no problem anyway because of 'such and such'... While I may not know if that is entirely true, the hard drive is still intact.

... SC's don't particularly believe it has to be INTACT in order for this miricle to be done. Failing? Only if your really lucky. Smoking? No. Spilt something? No. WTH did you do to this thing? No way hozay am I getting anything off that.

But even if they don't say it, thier thinking 'But they do it on TV all the time! It's possible!'

... I know this, because both my brother, father, and a best freinds yammered something along those lines to me after their own drives went Kaput.

They all got at LEAST a pillow thrown at them. It's to similar to the 'Photoshop Magic' they do on tv that drives me (photo/art edit wakemonger) insane.

[Soulstealer]

Howard and Gelato both have my important files on them (guess which one I named while hungry), I also keep a few things from on a usb if they're currently important and send files to someone else to back them up.

[Pedersen]

You know what really bugs me though? On TV, whenever they say 'the hard drives been wiped!'... ' oh, but we can get it back no problem anyway because of 'such and such'... While I may not know if that is entirely true, the hard drive is still intact.

... SC's don't particularly believe it has to be INTACT in order for this miricle to be done. Failing? Only if your really lucky. Smoking? No. Spilt something? No. WTH did you do to this thing? No way hozay am I getting anything off that.

Here's the amazing part: Your drive can be a shambles, and data can still be recovered from it with the right equipment. Run the platters through a shredder? They can be re-assembled, and then read using specialized equipment.

And enough data can come off them that it will frighten you.

The reason is simple magnetism. Your hard drive is a magnetic drive. As such, it has magnetic fields. Those fields drift over time. The longer a file stays in one particular place on your computer, the stronger those fields are, and the less contained they are. Basically, copies of these files can be read from between the individual tracks that make up your hard drive.

This service isn't cheap. The equipment isn't cheap. The training to do the recovery really isn't cheap.

But it can be done. Just not by mere mortals like you and me

[Lingering Grin]

Here's the amazing part: Your drive can be a shambles, and data can still be recovered from it with the right equipment. Run the platters through a shredder? They can be re-assembled, and then read using specialized equipment.

Yup, and this is why the government turns their hard drives into ASH when they dispose of them.

You can't get information off of carbon powder


What's even crazier is that there is a program out there that can get back files that have been deleted for years, as long as they haven't been completely overwritten or zeroed out. This is because computers (well, operating systems actually) don't really delete files at all. All they do is take the first few characters of the file and turn them into zeroes, and then over-write the sector later on when it's needed. This is also why you need to defrag the hard drive, in order to re-order these sectors so that the computer can use em.

[Pedersen]

You can't get information off of carbon powder

You might be surprised. The government doesn't have to recover everything, just enough to be useful. So, I'm *quite* sure they're working on it, at the minimum, and might already have the solution in a nice classified bunker somewhere.

This is because computers (well, operating systems actually) don't really delete files at all. All they do is take the first few characters of the file and turn them into zeroes, and then over-write the sector later on when it's needed.

Right and wrong at the same time. How the file gets marked as deleted depends on the formatting of the disk. For instance, the Commodore 64 (yes, I'm showing my age here) would turn the first byte of the filename to a special character, and that would signify the file's deletion. MS-DOS would do something similar. Other file systems have a list of files, and will remove the filename from the list. Still others maintain a bitmap of the used and unused blocks on the disk, and just flip those bits.

It very very much depends on the formatting of the filesystem as to how a file gets marked as deleted. In fact, a secure filesystem would actually overwrite the file with zeros before marking it as deleted.

This is also why you need to defrag the hard drive, in order to re-order these sectors so that the computer can use em.

Actually, defragging the hard drive does nothing for whether or not the computer can use the sectors. It does everything for how the computer uses them.

Basically, as files get written, they get assigned to certain sections of the hard drive. File fragmentation occurs when a large file has different file segments spread all over the hard drive. This results in noticeably slow downs as the read/write heads move back and forth seeking the data on the drive.

Defragmentation (defragging the drive) takes those file segments, and moves them together so that the large file can be read in one continuous stream, resulting in quicker read time on the drive, and thus faster response from the computer trying to load that file.

And on that note, I should stop. I've probably dug out more details on the inner operations of people's hard drives than they wanna know, and am boring them to tears already. I hope not, but you never know.

[earl colby pottinger]

Possible just enough time to hurt

They all got at LEAST a pillow thrown at them. It's to similar to the 'Photoshop Magic' they do on tv that drives me (photo/art edit wakemonger) insane.

Worse that photo magic does work in real life in just a few special cases (Take a high quality digital camera and take a large number of shoots right after each other, with the right programs you can sometime get a final picture of far higher resolution than the original camera).

Somehow, people who believe the 'Photoshop Magic' is real for all cameras will always catch a PBS documentary of deep space photography, geo-surveys, or extreme camera hobbyists then insist that you can do the same on some old photo because they saw it being done on TV, while somehow never hearing a word about how carefully the camera setup needed to be, or the large number of photos taken or even how much money was needed to be spent to achieve the final results.

Opps, that is right sucky customers/friends never listen/read the fine details.

[Lingering Grin]

You might be surprised. The government doesn't have to recover everything, just enough to be useful. So, I'm *quite* sure they're working on it, at the minimum, and might already have the solution in a nice classified bunker somewhere.

Actually, you can't, because ash is pure carbon. You can't even tell what the ash came from

There's no difference between the ash created by a hard drive, and that created by a piece of paper... or a human body. It's just carbon

[Broomjockey]

Except that ash isn't pure carbon. It's easier for it to turn to carbon dioxide and such when it burns, so usually the ash left behind is the materials where the energy required is more than released by burning. Also, to demagnitize something, it often takes temperatures far in excess than that generate by small scale fires, not to mention enough to actually *burn* the magnetic media.

[UncleImpy]

Sort of back on the original topic, with as cheap as internal hard drives are now, there's really no excuse to not buy two and mirror them. ESPECIALLY if you're going to have Important Data on it. My new machine has a mirrored pair of 250 Gig drives...because my last machine suffered a hard drive failure and my last backup was 6 months old (sigh).

[powerboy]

Whenever I get upload audio or photo from an investigation, I load them both on to a CD: R/W

[Cyphr]

when i finish my drives i powder the platters burn that powder then proceed to pass that under a MASSIVE neodynium magnet i have and then pour thoose ashs in the lake you ain't never finding my illegal stuffs

[wolfie]

They all got at LEAST a pillow thrown at them. It's to similar to the 'Photoshop Magic' they do on tv that drives me (photo/art edit wakemonger) insane.

Or the old TV cop show "Hunter", where the printer spat out a full-colour picture of a suspect - and I recognized the printer as an Epson 9-pin dot-matrix, with the picture coming out at "form feed" speed.

[lordlundar]

Or the old TV cop show "Hunter", where the printer spat out a full-colour picture of a suspect - and I recognized the printer as an Epson 9-pin dot-matrix, with the picture coming out at "form feed" speed.

In short, you saw that, recognized that specifically, then went "I need a life."

[clowninasack]

Hehe, I've gotten quite paranoid since I deal with so many hard drive failures. My new computer has two 74GB 10k RPM drives in RAID0, and three 500GB drives in RAID5. I also run a backup to my debian box with 40GB drives in RAID1 (I don't back up my pirated crap there, I burn that to DVD) in the spare room every night.

I used run a rsync script on my laptop that backs it up to my debian box occasionally as well, but I don't run that regularly anymore because I don't have linux running on my eee pc yet.