First Steps in Data Recovery from Flash Drives

Flash drives, also known as USB drives and thumb drives, are among the handiest little devices ever created. While they haven’t eliminated the need for data recovery services, they’ve certainly reduced the occurrence of data loss that used to be incredibly common.

It’s hard to believe that just a dozen short years ago, your only option for carrying computer files with you from one machine to another was the floppy disk – a horribly and easily corruptible data storage device that were more prone to data loss than just about any media storage device ever created. All it took was one little spill to wipe out the dozens of documents saved on those little plastic disks – and sometimes not even that.  For instance, some people had recurring problems with thier 3.5” floppys erasing over and over. They would copy information to a disk, drop the disk in a pocket with a cell phone, which emitted just enough of a magnetic electric field to erase the disk completely.

The advances in technology since then are amazing. Today’s flash drive or data card – not much bigger than your thumbnail – can hold as much data as we compiled on our library of hundreds of 3.5” floppies. Unfortunately, that also means that when something goes wrong, you’re prone to losing a whole lot more data than your homework for tomorrow’s class. Recovering that data can be tricky, but there are some steps you can take to make data recovery from a non-functioning flash drive easier.

First, do not save anything else to that drive. Every particle of data that you save will get written to the disk, and you run the risk of overwriting data that you want to recover. Remove the drive from your computer, just to be on the safe side, while you do the next few steps.

Download data recovery software onto your computer and install it. You can find many free data recovery software titles that can help you explore your thumb drive and attempt to recover the files from it.

Insert the thumb drive into the USB slot on your computer. Start the data recovery software and follow the instructions for finding and saving the files you need to your hard drive.

If you can’t access the flash drive at all, stop trying. It’s a job for data recovery professionals, such as those at Fields Data Recovery. Contact Fields Data Recovery for instructions on how to package and ship your drive to them, as well as a quote on what their data recovery services will cost.

Important Data Recovery and Disaster Preparedness Findings

Symantec, one of the world’s best known names in the field of data protection, recently released a report on the state of disaster preparedness and data recovery options for small and medium businesses. They surveyed almost 2,000 small and medium businesses about the effects that a data loss would have on their business and published the results in a January 2011 report. How does your business stack up against the typical SMB when it comes to being prepared with a data recovery and security plan?

Most Businesses Have No Disaster Recovery, Data Security or Data Recovery Plan

According to the report, only half of the businesses surveyed have a disaster recovery plan that deals with data recovery. Of those, 14 percent have no intention of creating a plan, 25 percent say they’ll implement one in the next three to six months and 34 percent plan to implement a disaster and data recovery plan in the next three months. Despite the fact that nearly 50 percent of the SMBs have no data recovery plan in place, 84 percent believe that their computers are protected from data loss and over 80 percent are satisfied with their plans to deal with outages and disruptions caused by data loss.

Most Businesses Face Serious Loss Due to Data Loss and Insecurity

The risk of outages and disruptions due to data loss is a significant one. About 65 percent of all small and medium businesses are located in a region that is prone to natural disasters. The average SMB experienced six “outages” in the past year. The most common reasons for data loss – and a subsequent need for data recovery services – included cyberattacks,  unexpected power outages, employee errors and upgrades.

In addition, few companies are as protected in the area of data recovery as they believe they are. About half of the companies in the survey back up the majority of their data, fewer than half back up their data at least once a week and less than 25 percent back up their data every day. Even worse, many of them fail to back up really important data – the type that data recovery companies like Fields Associates are frequently called upon to restore. Greater than 30 percent don’t back up their email, over 20 percent don’t back up application data and over 15 percent don’t back up customer data. According to these companies, they’d lose at least 40 percent of their data in the event of a disaster that impacted their servers, computers and other devices.

Is your company protected in case of a data emergency? If you’re among the one-half of all small and medium businesses who have no data recovery plans in place, the time to act is now, before a disaster happens.

Data Recovery Myths and Facts

What does data recovery have in common with primitive religions and mythology? If you guessed “voodoo solutions”, you’d be half right. In prehistoric times, man created myths to explain phenomenon he could not understand. The more important something was in his life, the more likely it was that he’d create a myth to explain it – and some voodoo solution to prevent it from happening or recover from it. When you consider the importance of computers and the data that their hard drives and other media hold, it’s no wonder then, that there are so many myths about lost files and data recovery. Here are some of the best known myths about data recovery and the facts about them.

Myth: You can remove the hard drive platters from one drive and put them in another to read them.

It is possible, but not for most users. Hard drive cases should only be opened in a clean room, and only by professional hard drive data recovery professionals. Manufacturers calibrate the alignment of the disk platters and drive heads within thousandths of an inch to maximize performance. If you mess with the inner workings of a drive, you’re seriously compromising the ability of data recovery professionals to recover any of your lost data.

Myth: Lasers can read hard drive disks without opening the case.

Chalk this myth up under the “not yet” heading. There’s promising research using lasers and other external means to scan hard drives, but so far there’s nothing that’s practical for use even by commercial data recovery firms. It may happen someday, though, and it will eliminate the risks of opening a hard drive case.

Myth: Hard drive manufacturers guarantee recovery of data from a failed hard drive.

Unless there is a special arrangement for a particular company, manufacturers of hardware don’t cover the cost of data recovery under warranty agreements. In fact, most manufacturers explicitly exclude data from coverage under their warranties, and state that they are not responsible for data that’s lost or damaged during transit, repair or replacement of your hard drive. Back up your data regularly so that you can restore it to a new hard drive or to a hard drive after repair if necessary.

Myth: You can use data recovery software to recover data from a drive that has failed mechanically.

If a hard drive has failed or is failing mechanically, any attempts to access or recover data from that drive can further damage the data on the drive and make it more difficult to recover.

If your hard drive has failed or if you can’t access a hard drive for any reason, the best course of action is to call in a data recovery professional like Fields Data Recovery. Don’t try to go it alone or you risk making it impossible to recover data that you might otherwise have been able to save.

Data Recovery Tips for Small BusinessBusiness

If you run a small business, you’re more likely to need data recovery services than your bigger corporate brothers. Today, more and more small businesses rely on their computers and computer files to help them get information out to customers, keep track of accounts and cut their expenses. Computerization has made many of the parts of doing business easier. From accounting to publishing, the computer makes it easier for one person to handle most, if not all, of the tasks that used to require a full office staff. With one computer, you can handle the books and accounting, sales, communications and other parts of your business. However, this also makes your business more vulnerable to data loss and increases the likelihood that you’ll need data recovery services in the future.

Unlike larger businesses, these small business operations usually can’t afford such luxuries as fully redundant RAID drives and expensive data backup systems. When something goes wrong with their hard drives or other data storage devices, they often have no choice other than to turn to a professional data recovery service like Fields Data Recovery. In many cases, that’s an expensive option – and it’s made more expensive and difficult if the small business owner takes the wrong steps in trying to recover his lost files himself. In fact, in many cases, the business can avoid the need for data recovery services by taking a few important steps.

Backup, Backup and Backup Your Data

The biggest risk you can take with your business is to have only one set of up to date records. That’s why backing up your data regularly should be a vital part of your business routine. These days, it’s easier and less expensive to do than ever. In fact, it’s fairly easy to do a three-layer backup yourself, without taking a lot of your time.

Subscribe to an automatic backup service that backs up your files to an off-site computer every night. Most only cost a few dollars a month, and there are even free services you can use. If you’re willing to do a little bit of work yourself, you can even do nightly backups and transfer the backup to an online, off site server yourself.

Back up important files after any major changes to an external data storage device, such as an exterior hard drive or tape drive. You can set your computer to do this automatically, but be sure to check the backups regularly to ensure that they’re error-free and restorable.

Keep a second copy of your most important files on your computer, and use Save As to update the second copy whenever you make a significant change. That gives you immediate access to a backed up copy in the event you accidentally delete the file or can’t access it.

Practice Safe Data Recovery

You should also be aware that nearly anything you do with your hard drive after it starts to fail may make it more difficult for data recovery experts to retrieve any data from it in the event you are unsuccessful. If you can’t access the disk at all, your best option is to contact a reputable data recovery firm, such as Fields Data Recovery, and follow their instructions to the letter.

Data Recovery from Solid State Drives

Solid state drive technology is moving into more and more arenas, and with good reason. SSD is increasingly used in mobile devices and often replaces traditional hard disk drives in high-quality laptops, netbooks and desktop computers. While SSDs offer many advantages for data storage, they also offer exceptional challenges for data recovery, according to data recovery professionals. The traditional methods of data recovery don’t work with solid state drives, which rely on a completely different method of storing data than do hard disk drives.

Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

SSDs were originally developed for military use, and later adapted for use in MP3 players, USB drives and memory cards, including those commonly used in camcorders, digital cameras and phones. They differ drastically from hard drive disks, which store data on magnetically charged disks. SSDs instead use a solid-state semiconductor, such as a memory chip or other electrically erasable RAM devices. Because they don’t use moving parts nor require synchronization among moving parts, SSDs boot up more quickly, access files more quickly, launch applications more quickly and move data more quickly, and do so while using less energy. This means faster operation and longer battery life.

Data Loss and Data Recovery on Hard Drives

Hard drives are more susceptible to data loss as a natural consequence of mechanical wear, among other things. There are two types of hard drive failures that lead to a need for data recovery – logical failures, such as accidentally deleted files, corrupted data, software errors and corrupted data; and mechanical failures that happen because of physical damage to the drive – scratched disks, for example. While it’s easier to lose data from a hard drive, data recovery is also generally relatively easy. Even in cases of actual physical failure, which requires the work of a data recovery professional, most of the data can often be recovered.

SSD Data Recovery – Less Often Necessary but Harder to Do

Since SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re far less likely to suffer from mechanical failure than hard drives, and thus far less likely to suffer data loss. When it does happen, however, it’s usually because of electrical damage, firmware corruption or controller failure. Of course, you can still accidentally delete files or get a virus that corrupts your files. Unfortunately, the very things that make SSDs more efficient and faster also make data recovery harder. Unlike hard drives, which can overwrite data, SSDs must erase data before writing new data to a section on the drive. In order to maximize performance, many SSDs periodically “clean up” the drive by erasing orphaned blocks of data, making it far less likely that data recovery professionals can find and recover the data that was originally written to them.

Data recovery experts use proprietary methods to recover as much data as possible even from solid state drives, and many have remarkable success at doing so. If you’ve lost data from a device that stores it on an SSD and think it’s irretrievably gone, check with a data recovery expert such as Fields Data Recovery, before giving up on it. There have been surprising strides in data recovery technology that allow professionals to retrieve data from many SSDs.

Data Recovery in the Era of Cloud Computingthe

Cloud computing is the wave of the future, or at least it appears to be. It offers many advantages over traditional methods of networking and application use, and it can be more secure, suggests a former information security officer for the Justice Department, but you shouldn’t rely on cloud computing for disaster recovery. You can make automated data storage a part of your disaster recovery plans and business continuity planning, but be sure to also make a plan for traditional data recovery services.

Cloud computing can make post-disaster data recovery easier in some cases, but it’s best not to count on it exclusively. If you haven’t already developed a disaster recovery plan that includes data retrieval, there’s not time better than before disaster strikes.

First Steps in a Post-Disaster Data Recovery Plan

All data is not created equal. Your company won’t suffer much if you lose the file of job descriptions, most of which exist in hard copy. The loss of the customer order files, on the other hand, could put a significant crimp in your business.

The first step in creating a post-disaster data recovery plan is to classify your data by its importance to your company so that you can assign it a level of priority for backup and recovery.

Create a backup plan and institute backup procedures and policies based on the priorities you identified. As part of that plan, identify the roles that each person on your data recovery team will fill. Make sure that each person understands the importance of carrying out his or her assigned role and give them ownership of it. The biggest pitfall in designing backup plans is employees who are not fully on board with or accountable for the data recovery plan you’ve come up with.

Always, always, always check your backups periodically to be sure that they’re running right if they’re automated, and that they can actually be restored. An IT chief’s worst nightmare is popping in the backup tape to restore lost data only to find that the file is corrupt or an error prevents your system from doing a full restore.

Identify a data recovery firm, such as Fields Associates, to handle data recovery chores that can’t be handled onsite. Don’t wait till it’s too late to identify the right company to handle your data recovery problems. You’ll have more perspective and time to make the right choice when you’re not panicked by an emergency.

Why Data Recovery Solutions Are Vital to Your OperationVital

Data recovery is something no one wants to think about before the need for it smacks them in the face. Unfortunately for most businesses and organizations, by that time, it’s too late for DIY data recovery solutions and they have to turn to a professional data recovery specialist. If your organization depends on its computer files, it’s vital that you put some thought into data recovery solutions so that your entire workforce – even if it’s just you and your computer – knows what to do if the computer crashes or they accidentally delete an important file or database. If you’re not sure whether or not data is important to your operation, think about the way that you use the files on your network hard drives and your computer every day and then consider what it would cost you to have to work without them.

Accounting Records

Do you do your books in Quicken or any other accounting or bookkeeping program? These programs allow you to easily print out invoices, pull up reports about your customer base, generate profit and loss statements and other accounting tools, and manage your books from one easy interface. What happens if you suddenly can’t access your company’s books? How many days would it take your company to reconstruct those records from paper trails? Safeguarding those important files is vital to your business.

Letterheads, Templates and Company Boilerplates

Many small businesses save money on stationery by keeping their letterhead in a word processing template. Others use templates for grant applications, invoices, brochures and other important business tools. From one-pagers to business reports, most organizations keep hundreds of hours worth of work on their network hard drives. If that suddenly became inaccessible to you, how long would it take to put it all back together? Days? Weeks? How much time would it end up costing your business to lose all of the papers it relies on in its daily operation?

Those are only a few examples of the way companies rely on their computer files without even thinking about it. If your hard drive crashed today, could you run your business effectively?

Unfortunately, when something goes wrong, most people panic and attempt to recover the data themselves. All too often, their efforts end up making the files even more inaccessible. Every one of your employees needs to know the steps to take if something goes wrong, or you risk them taking steps that will make it impossible for even a professional data recovery company to bring them back.

If you have a data emergency, contact a professional data recovery company for advice on the best way to proceed. They’ll be able to advise you on safe steps you can attempt on your own and let you know if you need professional help to retrieve your lost or inaccessible files.