How You Got Into Data Recovery

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
I'm curious to hear how other people first got into doing data recovery work as a profession. So let me start with my story, and then perhaps you'd like to share yours.

About 7 or 8 years ago I was working as an electrician for a company that also did quite a bit of networking and IT work for some of our larger clients. My wife at the time worked doing bookkeeping for her father's multimillion dollar construction company. When the occasion arose, I'd help out fixing a computer or two to help things run smoothly (mostly to help my wife out). Unfortunately backing up his computers wasn't high on his priority list, and pretty much never got done.

One day his main office bookkeeping computer wouldn't boot. I stopped in to see if I could remedy the situation, and discovered that the hard drive was having some issues. I was able to get the computer back up and running on a new drive pretty quickly but when we went looking for a backup of his Quickbooks file, and other current contract documents they were about a year out of date.

It took me about a week to figure out how to get the data back. The drive had bad sectors in the filesystem and would today be a simple recovery for me, but I had to learn how to get a good clone and then recover the files from it from scratch (having no data recovery experience). GetDataBack became my friend that day.

Later on I happened to talk with my boss about the recovery and shortly after he had a couple other data recovery incidents come up from some customers and friends he knew, so I handled most of those as well. Mostly just logical stuff and a few PCB replacements. Then I had the bright idea to start up a side business recovering data.

Early on I made the mistake that a lot of people do, and I bought Salvation Data tools :roll: and I became quickly frustrated when they never seemed to work and raised more questions than provided answers in this work. However determined to continue on i purchased PC-3000 from Ace Labs, enlisted some help (mostly from Luke from Recovery Force) to learn how to use the tool and it's been my main business now (not just a side business) for almost 2 years. My wife has since left her father's company and is my bookkeeper and office manager.

So what's your story?
 

LarrySabo

Member
Jared":34uh7d0p said:
I'm curious to hear how other people first got into doing data recovery work as a profession.
Does this exclude those of us who do DR to augment the other things we do as our primary source of income, meaning we're not DR professionals?
 

LarrySabo

Member
Okay, great! :) I'm certainly not a DR professional, just trying to augment the income from my small PC repair business and cope with declining PC prices. Because my customers are residential and SOHO PC users, I come across many who need data recovery but can't afford or are not willing to pay the prices most professional DR labs around here charge. At first it was just logical recoveries and the occasional BSY/CAP fix or TVS diode repair. To expand the recovery business, I needed tools, training, and experience at an affordable, incremental cost. At my age, there was no way I was going to make a major investment and risk financial ruin by specializing in DR, especially when there were already three local professional DR labs. My age also meant I did not have the time and mental acuity required to address the complex needs of large organizations, e.g., complex RAID arrays, SAS drives, servers, business-critical databases and proprietary business software, etc.

I was using Linux to recover files from drives with bad sectors and decided it was time for a hardware duplicator/imager to speed things up, deal with lock-ups, and improve my recovery rates. I bought an Atola Bandura because it seemed a good alternative to a DDI, given its lower price ($1,750 vs $3,500), it's a stand-alone device that requires no training, and it's super easy and convenient to use. It yielded excellent results for the majority of cases I encountered, where bad sectors are the problem.

The Bandura obviously didn't help with firmware problems, so to increase the number of problems I could address, I decided to go with DFL products for firmware repairs. No way I could justify the cost and maintenance fees of a PC3K or an Atola Insight, and SD was obviously a poor choice. I bought a DFL-DE imager ($1,999 US) because it generates image files (rather than requires a stock of target drives), and it incorporates many common firmware fixes for popular drive brands. With the increasing capacity of drives, it quickly became clear that I needed more speed. So, I upgraded the DFL-DE to a DFL-DDP USB 3.0 imager which was functionally identical but many times faster, for the difference in price. For an additional $610 US, I could get a tool for repairing WD firmware issues and for another $610, I could upgrade it to address Seagate firmware. Since WD and Seagate appeared to be the survivors of a consolidating industry, the DFL tools were expected to become increasingly relevant and sufficient. So I bought a bought a Dolphin Data Lab (parent of DFL) FRP-WD+ST firmware repair tool. It can be upgraded by means of firmware updates, to repair firmware problems on most other makes of drives, but the demand to do that is not yet sufficient to justify it.

I think my strategy was sound, but I failed to realize how limited the residential market really is. Establishing a network of partners with local PC repair shops is probably critical to making a real success of a data recovery business, and as Jared has noted, it's tough to partner with your competition. The business is still building, and the investment should be recouped within the next year or two. Not as great as could be if it were a dedicated DR business started at an earlier age, but still worth doing.
 

pclab

Moderator
Well, my story is not so very different from others...

Once, I saw a topic on a forum where I was a moderator of IT section, of a guy willing to repair the SMART of a drive. Because I didn't know how to solve it, I decided to investigate.
And I found SD ( :oops: :oops: )
After checking with them, I decided to buy all their Doctors. I had the money, so the investment seems logic and profitable, because in the near area, there is (still) no competition on DR. They told me that there were many cases of "one button click solution" and I thought it would be great.
After that, I also bought a DDI 3 (the best purchase). This was really the best and easy way to earn money. Everyone said it was the best of the market (I still think so).
When SD died, DFL appeared with their WD tool which I bought, but I needed to get a tool to work with all brands, and DFL didn't had it. So, next step: a PC3K UDMA, but without DE. I already had an imager....
But later on, I needed another imager. And DE from ACE is/was expensive. So I also decided to buy a MRT tool, so I can get both worlds of FW repair and DE. This tool I have at home, where I do my experiences/tests and some imaging jobs.
My main idea of getting tools from all vendors, is also to have access to their manuals, solutions, etc. I think it's more important than the tools.
And after 4 years. here I am :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
 

ScotchBroth

New member
Hi all!

I'm brand new in this forum and I think it's pretty stellar. While working in digital forensics I thought 'Hey I could probably use all the knowledge I had from that field and apply it to data recovery!" That was in 2010.

After clawing my way for 5 years now I've become what I consider to be a novice at data recovery. Glad that I never fell in the SD trap that I hear about, and went with Deepspar and Ace (PC3000 kicks my ass every day!)

Again I'm digging this forum vibe.
 
I was in week end trip with my friends at my family Farm ,my cousin decided to hear some music and asked me to give him my personal laptop to play the music , I gave it to him but he was very curious about E: Partition in my laptop why its locked ? I told him it contain a personal stuff (my work , personal pictures , and things don’t want other to see ) the Partition was encrypted by the bitlock which come with windows OS, he insist asking me the password to unlock the partition or he will format the Partition (threatening me as kind of joke)

The logical thinking is he can’t format the Partition if its password protected , the bitlocker should ask for the password first then format

So I answered him with full trust mouth( format it if you can )…… he didn’t hesitate to press right click and format OK >> Format completed ..!!

I was shocked Oo :shock: how it’s happened , the drive wiped and unlocked , at the begging didn’t realized the mass destruction he did , I think it could download just a free recovery software and do the job until the results come out >> garbage and rubbish Data what the hell did he DO, I blamed the Microsoft for that keep sending emails to them answer me with no good solution , read a lot about the problem in Forums but no useful answer
That was the Door to thinking about data recovery

I have B.Sc software engineering , currently run a family business in Food industries and have a good room in the factory made it just for data recovery have a partner own PC-workshop bring to me the Hard Drives , I purchased the tools from China PC3K UDMA+DE and get training from chine’s master

I am still DR Noob As the title under my name :( , Hope to be more professional at the near future

Abed
 
@hddguy

yes i tried it before , i had the password and the back up key in text file , But didn't work it very old issue since 2011

this is the old post in Microsoft forum

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 948a4e7f9e


this picture is the error i get, something about critical encryption key issue

Bitlocker.jpg


i give up long time ago about this case , we have an ancient effective saying " misfortunes of some people Benefits others "
as i said in the previous post , this problem was my gate and motivated me to enter the Data recovery world and i am pleased for it :geek:

Thank you for caring hddguy
 
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