Things have changed a lot since I started Southbit data recovery in 2010. A lot of the hard drives coming in for data recovery at our Cape Town lab were averaging around the 100GB mark. Quite a few were still IDE hard drives. A 160GB 3.5″ drive with 3 or 4 platters was the norm. […]

We live in an age where information is at our fingertips. If we need to find something, a product or service, we either ask someone, or ask Google. It’s important to do your research when searching for a service provider online as things can go very wrong if you choose the wrong one. We have […]

When a hard drive fails the first question people often ask is can it be fixed? This isn’t a straightforward question to answer as it depends on which component of the hard drive has actually failed. For the most part the answer is no as when a hard drive fails it’s often to a degree […]

Occasionally (more often than we like) we get hard drives in for data recovery that have already been opened up as the client has watched a YouTube video on data recovery 101 and decided to give it a bash himself. As a hard drive recovery specialist, watching these videos makes me cringe. The people who […]

We all know about the ‘safely eject’ option for our external hard drives and flash drives. Some of us joke that ‘life is too short to safely eject’ which, although funny, could hold some dire consequences. As a hard drive operates the platters spin at a few thousand revolutions per minute whilst the heads fly […]

Some people believe that their data will be safe as long as they look after their hard drive. This caring for their data can be in the form of buying a more reliable hard drive, ensuring the hard drive or laptop is locked away or always within site, or purchasing rugged storage such as an […]

We deal with all sorts of different cases where a client’s hard drive is in need of data recovery. Hard drives can, and do, fail for a number of reasons. There are different ways of categorising hard drive failures, but let’s look at instances where a drive suffers what is known as ‘media damage’ or […]

People have different ideas about what happens when they book their hard drive in for data recovery. Some clients think that their hard drive is merely plugged into a machine and a button is pushed, others have the idea that we remove the platters and read them on some sort of universal hard drive reader. […]

If you’re in a position where you need to store large amounts of data, need it readily available and can’t afford any downtime then you should consider a NAS setup in RAID configuration. The joy of a NAS is that the data is accessible over the network, hence the name ‘network attached storage’. Your users […]

Just because you have an SSD doesn’t mean you should skimp on your data backup regime. SSD drives do fail, and when they do the chances of recovery are less than that of data recovery on conventional hard drives. The technology used in SSD drives, the controllers and NAND chips, means that when a problem […]