A burst water pipe over your home office, a flooded cellar where the River Aire pours into your back yard when it rains in Yorkshire, a house fire which burned everything except for your safe and its contents: the one piece of luck with disaster media is that platters and flash chips are a lot stronger than all of the rest of what surrounds them. The recovery rules, however, have some very surprising twists. Don’t try to dry anything until you read this.
The idea of using a radiator, airing cupboard or rice to dry out a wet drive is a terrible strategy for several reasons. The process of drying leaves all minerals and contamination the water picked up from its previous path as residue on connector contacts, and if water got inside the drive, the same residue would be left behind on the platters; dry residue can do much more damage to your data than wet residue. Water, especially floodwater, is not clean water. The correct procedure is to never turn the unit back on (a combination of electricity and damp electronic components will finish off whatever the water began), to place the drive in a sealed plastic bag (it doesn’t matter if it is still damp; that’s the point) and then to get it to our workbench, where we use controlled cleaning methods to strip away the contaminants before we begin the recovery process. Drives recovered after being saturated with water will generally recover well. Drives attempted to be “dried” are typically responsible for the other half of those statistics.
Fire damages storage in three forms. Heat: although most plastics will melt prior to the material used for magnetic disks demagnetising, the plastic of the burned container generally covers undamaged disks. Soot: conductive, intrusive and creating shorts on boards that are otherwise likely to function after a fire has passed. Aftermath: the chemical agents left behind by fire suppressants and the water from hoses. This process follows the same procedure as flooding. No electricity should be provided to the unit; do not attempt to clean the item; place the unit in a plastic bag; send it to us. Regardless of how badly your equipment appears to have been damaged, the cost of determining whether or not there was damage to the media is zero, even if the affected media is charred and resembles charcoal. In business environments, the above applies to our emergency service procedures when the damaged media is the one your business operates on.
Not necessarily, but stop there, and do not turn on your unit for verification. Drying leaves behind residues which the power will find. Bag the unit and send it to us as is. Controlled cleaning has many times been able to undo damage that would have otherwise prevented recovery. In addition, the diagnostic outcome does not cost anything either way.
Yes. All outcomes are documented normally, and we can provide you with written documentation regarding the condition of the device, what could be recovered, and what could not be recovered (in a format acceptable to insurers). If you notify our staff at intake that you have a claim being filed, the paperwork will follow suit.
There is no charge for this service, therefore yes, and often when an external surface appears to be “melted” it will contain viable storage inside. A hard drive platter can withstand heat far greater than its plastic exterior, and if a chip remains soldered to its board it may remain viable long after its board has died. On occasion we have received units in freezer bags of parts and still managed to recover the user’s data. At worst you receive a definitive and documented answer.