In the past several months I have become aware of an increasing number of cases which should be concerning to both the public and to the reputation of the data recovery industry.
1. More and more, over-confident IT professionals are attempting recovery activity well beyond their qualification e.g. platter transplant one-at-a-time. For us, the pros, it sends chills down our spine, because we know the answer before we even touch the drive. While it may be border line criminal – I certainly think so – what about the unsuspecting customer who I am sure is being told, ”Sorry, your data was not recoverable.” If we continue to condone such activity we are in a way accomplices. Other than educate the public in blog postings such as this on what constitutes a data recovery professional, what else can we do, and who can we call for help? Is it time to clearly designate a professional data recovery and to include level of profficiency?
2. To support my points above, enclosed are two recent postings by two data recovery professionals who commented to our “When Enough is Enough” post in this blog. I copied their exact comments identifying them only by their initials.
Unfortunately the amount of re-work we are doing that has been to other, some quite established data recovery companies is significantly on the rise… We have witnessed deliberate damage caused to customers drives following them turning down quotes. It’s a very sad state of affairs for the customer. There is one particular company in the UK whose standards have significantly dropped of late, I wont name for legal reasons.
By C.L 11/15/2009
Whether recovered or not, there is a company here that burned the PCB of a perfectly good SCSI hard drive. This drive’s data was recovered, but they destroyed the PCB afterward. Why? I know exactly why in this case. Email and I can tell you the details. The drive had a firmware problem. The client wanted the drive back, so they destroyed it. I believe it would be far more a appropriate to return the firmware to it’s original faulty/bad state. If heads – well, put the original ones back in, etc. But of course, this involve MORE WORK. Sometimes, they simply don’t want to take the time to return the drive to its original state. At any rate, for years we could not deal with Quantum nor Western Digital alignments. We’d outsource these cases. Only one of these large well established giants in the industry returned the drives in good order. All others, damaged the components…drives that had good PCBs would return with burnt ones routinely
By M.T 11/15/2009
By some standards, this is even worse than the first problem. Those data recovery providers who damage the source drive for any reason are doing so clearly aware of their misguided action. I can not imagine any explanation why this kind of action could be defended.
What type of action would you recommend to deal with this problem?