How Floods Can Mean the End of your Data - But it Doesn't Have Too
Flooding has always been a problem. When it's expected, the problems can be mitigated. When it's unexpected, unsuspecting individuals and corporations can get caught out.
This means that the average member of the public, small business etc is often unaware of what to do because of the rareness of this type of event. As is often the case, the public or small businesses often try to repair some types of jobs themselves. As the computers most sensitive component is the hard disk drive, it is nearly always the first item to suffer the user's eagerness. Sadly for the person or company, the hard disk drive is of course the place where ALL their important data is kept.
Simple solutions such as placing critical IT equipment on a first floor or second floor, somewhere known to be outside of the flood risk area can alleviate all the issues and mitigate the risk. It is the unexpected flood where catastrophe is more likely to occur.
Taking Hurricane Katrina as an example; the South East coast of the US expected and was ready for bad weather and all the associated hurricane related problems. What it wasn't ready for was the breaching of the Levy's. This bought an exceptional amount of water into New Orleans, flooding the area, and of course causing billions of dollars of damage. This damage is generally thought of as literally bricks and mortar, however, there are also the hidden issues, such as the lost data on the residents/business owners computers, mobile phones, Blackberry's, PDA's etc.
In the United Kingdom, in places such as Worcestershire, Hull and Carlisle, a months worth of rainfall occurred in a single day. This happened several times in a month and caused rivers to burst their banks, causing devastating floods to areas not used to dealing with these types of incidents. Subsequently, thousands of people to lost there data as their computers were left under water.
Disklabs Data Recovery services have successfully retrieved data from wet, flood damaged hard disk drives. Disklabs Data Recovery stated that there are some fundamental Do's and Don'ts when it comes to retrieving data from flood damaged hard disk drives:
1. Do NOT attempt to recover your data themselves - doing this without experience and knowledge will undoubtedly damage your data. This simply makes it more difficult to recover when it eventually gets to Disklabs Data Recovery.
When hard disk drives get wet, the ‘heads' can get stuck to the platters. When the hard drive then gets spun up, the heads literally get ripped off causing damage to the platters, the place where all the data is stored.
2. Do NOT dry the hard disk drive out - this will nearly always destroy the platter of the hard disk thus making your data irretrievable.
When hard disk drives get wet then dry out, there is nearly always a residue of the contaminant left of the platters and heads. This causes problems because any contaminate, (including a piece of dust), causes physical degradation of the hard disk's platters. When this occurs, it means that data is being lost.
3. DO keep the hard disk WET. Ideally, keep the hard disk drive in a sealed container to keep the hard disk drive wet. This stops the hard disk drive corroding and allows the technical staff at Disklabs Data Recovery to clean and dry the platters correctly with minimum damage to the platter surfaces.
Simon Steggles MBCS
Director
disklabs®
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About Disklabs Data Recovery
Disklabs Data Recovery provides fully intrusive data recovery services from all forms of digital media. Including: Hard Disk Drives, Memory Cards, SSD Memory, Tapes, DC's, DVD's, iPod's, RAIDs, Mobile Phones etc.
Disklabs Data Recovery operate in the UK and Netherlands and hold ISO9001 accreditation for Quality Assurance, ISO BS EN 14644 for Air born Particle Contamination, are Data Protection registered. Disklabs Data Recovery are also authorised to carry out Data Recovery by Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi/IBM, Fujitsu, Maxtor and Toshiba without invalidating the warranty.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com
