Recommendations for drive recovery

[Amos Shapira]

I once helped a friend in a similar situation (family photos and documents
on a dying disk without backups).

I followed broadly the following procedure:
1. Put the disk in an airtight plastic bag (reason - to avoid humidity
getting in during the following steps).
2. Put in the freezer for an hour.
3. Remove from freezer and leave inside the bag for a few minutes (again -
to minimise risk of condensation).
4. remove from the bag, make sure no condensation builds up on it, wrap in
a kitchen towel (it was Sydney summer, so high temps and humid, though not
like Tel-Aviv summer). The idea was to keep any humidity away.
4. Put it on a block of icepack, and another icepack on top of it.
5. Connect it to a comp through an external USB box
6. GNU ddrescue (don't confuse with the non-GNU implementation). It can
keep track of where it got to in a previous run so you can pick up from
there.
7. Rinse, repeat.

It took 2-3 weeks of repeating this process but I managed to save all his
data (I think it was half a tera or so) except a tiny part (single-digit
kilobytes, I think).

The extra twist was that it was a Mac HFS file system and he wanted the
data accessible to Windows - Only Linux could be used to support both
filesystem formats :)


On 22 December 2014 at 16:15, Alon Barzilai <alon at skylinesoft.com> wrote:
>
>  Hi,
>
> there is tic tac  ( http://www.tictac.co.il )
> and recover (http://recover.co.il)
>
> I used them both in the past. and they both offered good service, but this
> service is not cheap.
> tic tac ares in this field for longer time, but as I recall their price is
> higher than recover.
>
> Alon.
>
>
>
> On 12/21/2014 11:46 PM, Geoff Shang wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> We have a 500 GB external USB drive that's about 5 or so years old (can't
> remember exactly when we got it).  It's now not spinning up propperly and
> we figure its days are numbered.
>
> Much of what is on it has not been backed up anywhere else (yes, I know).
>
> Is there somewhere I can take/send it to see if anything can be salvaged?
>
> Geoff.
>
>
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