Hard Drive Recovery Case Study Overview

“Hard Drive Recovery” is the part of the data recovery process that involves repairing the hard disk drive. This new series of articles are going to talk about the most common hard drive recovery scenarios we run into. By talking about the situations we run into on a daily basis, we hope to help others avoid data loss and hard drive problems.

Hard Drive Recovery Case Studies Explained

The case studies will be in a specific format that will outline everything from computer make and model, operating system and hardware configuration to hard drive type, capacity and manufacturer. By sharing our recovery experience with our readers DTI Data will continue its unique free support policy.

If there are any specific topics that anyone would like explored or if anybody has questions pertaining to hard drive recovery, please leave comments in this post and we will answer all questions and use your input in the creation of our content plan.

For those of you that are new to our site, DTI Data is a full service data recovery company. We operate a class 100 clean room where we perform all hard drive repair. All the software we sell on our website was created in house by our own engineers and programmers. DTI also has a full service network division that specializes in Exchange Server and database data recovery. We are certified to perform forensic data recovery and have biometric security to insure the confidentiality of our clients data.

By working with our engineers, technicians, programmers and sales staff I plan on providing the most useful information about hard drive recovery to be found online. Please leave a comment on this post if there is anything at all you are interested in learning about hard drive recovery.

Why Data Recovery Is Expensive

One of the most common questions about data recovery is “why is it so expensive?” I spoke with members of our sales team to find the answers. The first thing any person or company should think about is “what is my/our data worth?” You are the only one that can answer that question.

DTI Data is by far the fairest company in the land. We offer no data no charge services on pretty much all data recovery services. We also offer up front flat rate pricing on just about all data recovery. The only exceptions to both of those services are RAID recoveries and Exchange recoveries. All hard drive recovery of single drives is flat rate no data no charge pricing. If you are not sure what data recovery is, then read my husband Michael’s post: Data Recovery Services Explained to get an idea.

Data Recovery Cost Breakdown

For a company to repair hard drives on a regular basis, they need to have a lot of expensive tools as well as highly trained engineers and most importantly: a special environment. All of these requirements are mandatory to successfully recover data.

DTI Data has all the tools and experience to perform data recovery. They also have an extensive amount of hard drive parts needed to perform hard drive repair, the first step in data recovery. All of these things lead to a pretty high overhead, not including the labor and parts required to repair a hard drive.

DTI operates a class 100 clean room where they open hard drives. They also have proprietary tools to perform repairs to mechanical parts and electronics. Along with highly trained techs and engineers, these tools and operating areas lead to the overall pricing. If you are experiencing data loss more than likely you will call around to get the best price. You will be glad that you called DTI Data, because they offer the best pricing of any legitimate data recovery company.

The fact is if you are looking for data recovery services, something very bad has happened! Give DTI the chance to work for you. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need Data Recovery.

DTI Data Worth 1.7 Million on Leapfish.com

In my capacity of webmaster for DTI Data Recovery, I often use multiple tools to gauge the progress of our domain, and its placement within search engines and directories. A friend of mine told me about Leapfish.com a domain appraisal service. I was amazed to find that dtidata.com was appraised at 1.75 million dollars!

See for yourself here: DTI Domain Name Appraisal. Getting a look at what your domain is worth can be very helpful to a business. In our case using the services of Leapfish.com we were able to get a good idea of where our site ranks among other high powered websites.

I recommend that if you have a domain, get it appraised at Leapfish.com, and see how much it is really worth!

Data Recovery Software DART XP Overview

There are many types of data recovery software to choose from. If you are running Windows XP or Vista and are having problems with your computer not booting, then DART XP is the file recovery program you should use. Our programmers spent a lot of time working out the best ways to recover files from the NTFS file system. Rather than create a product that will work on all versions of Windows, they focused on the Operating systems that utilize NTFS, XP, Server, and Windows Vista.

Why DART XP Is The Best File Recovery Program

The primary things that separate DART XP from other file recovery programs are:

• Ease of Use - DART XP is a very powerful file recovery program, but is extremely easy to use.
• Scans Faster - DART XP and SmartScan^TM make the hard drive scanning portion of data recovery extremely fast. Other file recovery programs can take hours to scan a 60GB hard drive.
• Shows Recovered Files Before You Buy It - DART XP will show you the files that can be recovered before you buy it! Using a simple color coding, DART XP easily identifies the files that can be recovered BEFORE YOU BUY.
• Saves The Scan In Demo Mode - the demo or evaluation version of DART XP fully scans the drive and shows the recoverable data. If you are satisfied, simply purchase the product right through the program interface and you have the full version within minutes. You do not have to run the scan again! The full version instantly unlocks your files and allows you to move them to stable media.
• Powerful Search Engine - if there are specific file types you are looking for, DART XP’s powerful search tool, will recover your most important files first allowing you to get back to work while the rest of the hard drive is being recovered.

All in all, DART XP is the most powerful file recovery program  for the price on the market!

Download a demo for DART XP. Find other data recovery software. Visit DTI’s Data Recovery home page.

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Hurricane Katrina Revisited Water Damaged Hard Drive Recovery

Amazingly enough DTI is still receiving drives from Katrina victims. This is what prompted our re-visiting our hurricane disaster recovery planning. After even years, people are still just now getting to their damaged homes and computers. This is a reminder of how quickly everything can be lost. Our relief efforts to Katrina victims is still going on to this day.

Looking Back On Katrina Water Damaged Hard Drive Data Recovery

Flood damaged hard drives are among the toughest hard drive recovery cases we receive. DTI has proprietary measures we take that are unique in the industry. Living and working where we do, we have all felt the damage from water. Jacqui Best our support manager just had her house flooded not even two weeks ago! Sure FLorida is a great place to live, but we all get a little nervous this time of year.

Malcolm our head data recovery engineer sent a few pictures from the latest hard drive from Katrina. Here are hard drive parts from the water damaged hard disk:

The next shot of the water damaged hard drive is a close up of the platters:

We could tell when we opened the box that this was going to be a tough hard drive recovery. Here is a shot of the hard drive when we first opened the box:

Almost every flood damaged hard disk drive we receive for recovery has major corrosion. One of the top priorities is to stop the corrosion and get the drive platters into a recoverable state. We use special environmentally safe chemicals that help the process. Here is an example of the type of corrosion common on a water damaged hard drive:

The final picture shows typical corrosion focused on the back of the hard drive this time:

Even with all of these obstacles, DTI was able to recover this persons data! Call us if you have any questions:

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Below is a New Orleans TV Station that won an award for their interview with the owner of DTI, Dave Mohyla. Visit Our Hurricane Data Recovery Page for the entire interview.

Hurricane Season And Hard Drive Recovery Prevention

Hurricane season is upon us and here at DTI Data we are particularly aware of the damage that these storms can inflict since we are on the coast line in Florida. Being prepared for a hurricane means more than having plenty of batteries for your flashlight, it also means being prepared to protect your data. Hard drive recovery of a disk that has gone through a hurricane can be tricky business. More times than not, water damage is present as well as electronic problems that arise from power failures and brown outs.Hurricane

Hurricane Preparation And Prevention

All of us that live in hurricane zones have to contend with evacuations, flooding and days or weeks without electricity as well as taking steps to protect and preserve our data. For those of us who have off site servers, we can utilize FTP based backup solutions to store our data off site. There are services that the rest of you can use to backup your data online. A quick Google search for “online backup” will show you plenty of services that are out there. I personally haven’t used any because I use a program that encrypts, compresses and uploads my data to one of our webservers. Check out my post about backup solutions for more info.

The first thing you need to do is to audit your data. What files can you not live without? Having an idea of how much data you have to store can help isolate the media you will need to take with you in case of evacuation. If there is a storm brewing you should have enough time to prepare. You can get the National Hurricane Center RSS Feed and add your region’s news to your Google or Yahoo home page or whatever news reader you use to keep updated.

If you are unable to evacuate your computers another option is to travel with your hard drives. Taking your disks with you is one way to avoid hard drive recovery, as long as you are careful about how you store your drives. Our post about hard drive recovery has hard drive packaging instructions which can show you how to best protect your disks. If you have sensitive data you can also clone your hard drive and store it in a safe deposit box that is out of the hurricane and evacuation zones. Our product Speed Clone can make a sector copy of your hard disk drive that you can plug back into the machine if the original disk gets damaged.

If you have any questions about ways to protect your data and eliminate the requirement for hard drive recovery feel free to call us toll free at 1-866-438-6932.

The next article in this series will take a look back at Hurricane Katrina and the Hurricane disaster recovery relief efforts DTI Data was involved in.

Data Recovery Software

All of DTI’s Data Recovery Software are created right here in our own labs. Our programmers work closely with the data recovery engineers that perform hard drive recovery. Together they have developed the most powerful tool set for file recovery that exists. Our developers then create easy to use graphical interfaces that wrap the professional grade data recovery tools into workable software.

Data Recovery Software For Every Situation

DTI Data Recovery is very proud of its latest file recovery software line: D.A.R.T. DART  is especially designed for the NTFS 5 file system that is used by Microsoft Windows in XP and Vista. DART is extremely sophisticated data recovery software designed for both end users and computer repair technicians. By melding hard drive recovery technology with advanced undelete and partition repair features the new DART Data Recovery Software line is second to none.

At this time there are two powerful versions of DART:

• DART XP File Recovery Program - fashioned for NTFS 5 DART XP is the most powerful data recovery software available on teh market for Windows XP and Vista. It is fast and powerful with advanced file search and filter features.
• DART Undelete - Built for Vista and XP, DART Undelete can recover files that have been deleted or lost that other undelete recovery tools couldn’t recover. It also has a powerful but easy to use design.

DTI’s flagship product is the Recover It All software line. Recover It All is powerful data recovery software that works on Multiple Operating Systems:

• Windows Recover It All Data Recovery Software
• Novell Recover It All  Data Recovery Software
• Mac and Apple Recover It All Data Recovery Software

If you need data recovery software please visit our file recovery programs pages:

• Undelete NTFS Windows XP file recovery
• Undelete Win. 98, 2000 or FAT 32 files
• Partition repair format recovery XP, NTFS
• Partition repair format recovery Win 2000, 98
• Digital Picture flash media data recovery

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

**IF you have sent your drive to another company click here to find out what DTI Data can do for you!

For Free Fully Functional Data Recovery Tools click here.

To Download demo software that will show you your data before you pay for it, click here.

If you have a clicking hard drive visit our hard drive recovery page.

The History Of Backup

Being a data recovery company it is important to recognize backup solutions and get that information into the hands of our readers. We review different backup solutions and try to give the latest and most up to date information about data backup. While I was researching different types of backup programs I came across a website that was devoted to the history of backup.

The History Of Backup

This website features important milestones in the history of data backup , and its evolution from punched cards and magnetic tape reels to the emergence of network technologies with complex systems for remote backup storage. I highly recommend this site to anybody that has data backup concerns or is interested in protecting their data.

Knowing the history of backup can help you determine what the best solution for you or your companies data backup plan. Backup has come a long way over the last decade. With the addition of high capacity hard disk drives and even high capacity DVD writers and disks such as Blu-Ray and HD DVD allow for the backup of anywhere from 24 to 54 GB’s of data.

This site is essential to anyone looking for a solid backup plan. If you have any questions about storage visit The History of Backup.

Data Recovery Podcast 1: Overview Of A Hard Drive Recovery Company

Welcome to DTI Data Recovery’s first podcast! This will be the first in a multi-part series of podcasts that will deal with everything from data recovery software technical support to backup solutions and product reviews. They will include live interviews with our technical support technicians, sales staff, software programmers and network engineers. We hope to share with our readers and listeners vital information on how to not only recover their data, but how to protect it!

Hard Drive Recovery Podcast 1 

Portrait of A Hard Drive Recovery Company

DTI is really much more than a data recovery company. We do a lot more than most of our competitors including, but not limited to:

• In-House Data Recovery Software Creation - DTI started out as a pioneer in file recovery programs. Our programmers created one of the first data recovery software programs ever. Now there are hundreds of options to choose from when looking for data recovery software, but what separates DTI from just about all other software manufacturers is that we operate a full service clean room and perform hard drive recovery in the same labs where our data recovery software engineers are creating their programs. This is a mutually beneficial relationship because the hard drive engineers can share their experience with the programmers when it comes to the actual functions of hard drives and other storage medium, as well as the coders being able to create programs and recovery scripts on demand as the recovery situation warrants. This is a very powerful edge that DTI has over its competitors.
• Hard Drive Repair and Data Recovery - our primary business is data recovery of failed media like hard disks, RAID arrays, digital storage devices, etc. In most cases especially hard disk drives, the device has to be repaired in order to pull the data off of it. Hard drives need special environments for recovery, which is why we operate a class 100 clean room. A clean room not only is dust free, but static free. Having a clean room can be the difference between recovering a hard disk and not recovering one.
• Technical Support and Customer Communication - one of the best reasons to choose DTI Data Recovery is our technical support. We offer free pre-sales support on all of our data recovery software, as well as free Exchange Server and Exchange 5.5 Support. All of our data recovery software will show you the data before you buy them. Also our hard drive recovery services are no data no charge. Another thing that separates DTI from the pack is the communication we have between our engineers and our clients. Dick Correa explains about how the customer is the most important part of the recovery process in his article Data Recovery A Partnership For Success where he explains how nobody knows more about their data than the client.

That’s it for today. As always we request you leave any questions as comments so we can get them answered by our experts. We will be setting up some live technical chats this month so we can answer everyones questions in real time.

Data Recovery Software Comparison: Recover It All - DART XP

Which data recovery software should you use, Recover It All Professional or D.A.R.T. XP?

A lot of my pre-sales calls are to ask what the difference between Recover It All and D.A.R.T. XP are, so I thought I would write a quick comparison of the two so people would know what they need.

If you have a hard drive that has a single partition (one big drive) and it was formatted with NTFS 5 (Windows XP, Sever 2003, Vista) then your best bet for data recovery software is going to be the DART XP file recovery program. This piece of software is very easy to use, the scans are very fast, and you can purchase from inside of the software without having to re scan.

If your hard drive was formatted with any FAT file system (Windows 9x, Windows ME) or NTFS 4 (NT 4.0 server and workstation, Windows 2000) you must use the Recover It All Data Recovery Software. DART does not support these file systems.

NOTE: DART will work with Windows 2000 in some instances, if the Master File Table is still intact, I would recommend trying it first to see.

Recover It All will also work with NTFS 5 (Windows XP, Sever 2003, Vista), but the software is a very technical program and the scans can take longer then DART. If you are buying a piece of data recovery software as a technician, and know you will use this again I would always recommend you go with the Recover It All product. It has the ability to clone hard drives, re-write the boot and partition information, as well as find multiple partitions of different file systems.

In summery if you are a technician I recommend you purchase the Recover It All product, and if you are an end-user I would recommend the D.A.R.T. XP data recovery software.

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Next Page »