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 computer's 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
(in 2005) 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 Levees. 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.
More
recently, in
July
2007 in many parts of the UK , a month's 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 lost their data as their
computers were left under water. |
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| Disklabs have successfully
retrieved data from wet, flood damaged hard disk drives and based on that
experience offer this checklist of fundamental Do's and Don'ts:- |
 |
| damage in a
Hurricane Katrina flooded hard disk | |
| 1 - |
Do NOT attempt to recover
the data yourself. This will do more damage to your data and makes it more
difficult to recover when it eventually gets to a data recovery specialist.
When hard disk drives get wet, the 'heads' can get stuck to the
platters. When the hard drive is powered up in this state the disk tries to
spin up and 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. Although this may seem paradoxical - 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
contaminant left on the platters and heads. Any residue (including a piece of
dust), causes physical degradation of the hard disk's platters and loses more
data. |
| 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 the recovery company to clean and dry the platters correctly with
minimum damage to the platter surfaces.
Normally, Disklabs Data
Recovery charges a premium for water damaged hard disk drives, however, this
additional charge for the cleaning and drying out of the hard disk drive has
been waivered for the victims of the latest flooding events.
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| more data recovery related
articles:-
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About
the author:- Simon Steggles is a director
of
Disklabs Data Recovery and
Computer
Forensics Services, and
1st Computer Traders.
Simon was a member of the British Royal Navy
where he worked in
Communications and
Intelligence, leaving to take up a career in IT.
Simon
specialised in storage, and now runs
Disklabs.
Simon enjoys his family, wine, good food, travel,
and computing.
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