Description
When realising data is lost do you get that sinking feeling ? Losing many months of photos of a once in a lifetime around the world yachting race and facing explaining to your team mates all the data is gone really can leave you drowning in despair but abc Data Recovery came to the rescue.!
Imagine taking part in a round the world yacht race, a once a in a lifetime experience with thousands of pictures and memories, something that you’d probably never want to repeat, but would reminisce about for the rest of your days.
And then imagine the pain of losing everything, every picture, every bit of video, every journal you’d written. That’s what happened to Justyn Comer off the New York boat during the only round the world amateur yacht race of 2007-2008. And not just his pictures and documents, but all the crew’s pictures, videos and files as well. At least until abc Data Recovery Ltd came to the rescue. On average there would be fifteen crew, many of whom had hardly ever sailed before, taking part in a once in a lifetime experience. Challenging and rewarding, exhilarating and exhausting, a battle of the psyche and of team bonding.
The New York boat was competing against nine other identical yachts, and following a difficult beginning, came through the fleet to end up in Liverpool as the ultimate winner. This was an amazing adventure recorded with thousands of photographs, hundreds of blogs, and several hours of video, all of which could never be replaced, and were stored on the ships computer. After the end of the race, all the photos, documents, and other information from the ships hard drive were migrated across to a portable hard drive with the intention of copying them to CD, and distributing them amongst the crew.
“I can’t come close to adequately expressing how grateful I am to abc Data Recovery. I honestly believed I’d lost the lot. That was devastating to me, but also to the rest of the crew to whom I was responsible. For many of us these files were the only pictures we had of the race and the only mementos. I didn’t know if abc Data Recovery would be able to save them, the drive was in a terrible state, but once they did I want to shout from the rooftops to let everyone know about their service. They were helpful, they didn’t speak any technical gibberish at me, they just got on with the task and within a couple of days I could start sleeping a lot easier knowing I could get everyone their pictures. Thank you so much abc.”
For many of them this would be the only mementos of the race. On reaching land, Justyn Comer, one of the round the world crew, plugged in the drive, by now the only copy of the photos and memories. “I sat in horror as first smoke and then sparks came out of the drive. I unplugged it as quickly as I could, but was desperate as I realized I’d probably lost the lot.” In denial, he waited for a miracle for several months. “Every so often I’d plug it back in, but nothing worked, no noise, no sound, no sign that the computer recognized the drive. I felt awful. All of our files, gone.” Not only was the hard disk a valuable back-up of images and movies from the actual race itself, the standard process for the yacht crew members was to wipe all other copies in anticipation of the next race. As such it remained as the only copy of this genuinely irreplaceable data. All of those invaluable memories risked being lost, forever, until abc Data Recovery Ltd stepped in to help.
The over-voltage that the drive received caused such extensive damage that a hole was burnt straight through the outer plastic casing above one of the damaged components. Needless to say the device was completely innacessible by normal means, including when the 2.5” hard disk that the external enclosure contained was interrogated outside of the failed housing. After receiving the most competitive quote, and the only out of hours return phone call, from a number of data recovery service providers, Justyn took the decision to use abc data recovery to rescue this precious data.
A free of charge collection of the hard disk drive was arranged over the phone in minutes, abc Data Recovery received the drive for diagnosis. Within 1 hour the problems with the drive had been successfully diagnosed in abc’s ESD (static) safe electronics lab, an hour later the drive had been fully repaired by electronic engineer Paul Tomlinson, and was in a working state. The hard disk was now ready for the critical cloning process, during which, the unstable Toshiba notebook hard disk was copied to a more reliable hard disk media for further file recovery work to be commenced. The file recovery can often be a complex and time consuming process, often taking longer than any physical repairs to the device, but not for abc’s software team, head engineer Chris Sampson manually repaired a small amount of damage to the drive’s file system and mounted the entire drive, including all files and folders, to a workshop machine.
From here Justyn’s data was transferred to one of abc’s secure server arrays, ensuring that more than one copy of the critical data was kept at all times. Justyn was immediately called and confirmed instantly that we had retrieved what he was looking for, further investigation proved that the data was all intact, free from corruption and ready to be transferred to a similar hard drive that would serve as Justyn's return media.
The whole process, from receipt of the drive to successful recovery of all of the 91 GB of data that it contained, took only 4 and a half hours, a nervous four and a half hours for Justyn, however, abc were on hand at all times to reassure and update with the current progress of the recovery work. Justyn made the following comments about the service that he receieved from abc:
A free of charge collection of the hard disk drive was arranged over the phone in minutes, abc Data Recovery received the drive for diagnosis. Within 1 hour the problems with the drive had been successfully diagnosed in abc’s ESD (static) safe electronics lab, an hour later the drive had been fully repaired by electronic engineer Paul Tomlinson, and was in a working state. The hard disk was now ready for the critical cloning process, during which, the unstable Toshiba notebook hard disk was copied to a more reliable hard disk media for further file recovery work to be commenced. The file recovery can often be a complex and time consuming process, often taking longer than any physical repairs to the device, but not for abc’s software team, head engineer Chris Sampson manually repaired a small amount of damage to the drive’s file system and mounted the entire drive, including all files and folders, to a workshop machine. From here Justyn’s data was transferred to one of abc’s secure server arrays, ensuring that more than one copy of the critical data was kept at all times. Justyn was immediately called and confirmed instantly that we had retrieved what he was looking for, further investigation proved that the data was all intact, free from corruption and ready to be transferred to a similar hard drive that would serve as Justyn's return media. The whole process, from receipt of the drive to successful recovery of all of the 91 GB of data that it contained, took only 4 and a half hours, a nervous four and a half hours for Justyn, however, abc were on hand at all times to reassure and update with the current progress of the recovery work. Justyn made the following comments about the service that he receieved from abc:  |
