DriveSavers dispels common hard drive recovery myths

Freezing or hitting failed hard drives don’t work and can actually increase the damage, according to DriveSavers representatives. Known for successfully recovering data from thousands of drives a month, DriveSavers engineers have seen everything from burnt laptops to hairspray cemented floppy disks. Not wanting to pay for professional recovery, some people resort to urban legends that may sound good at first, but according to the company have no scientific basis for working.

We spoke with John Christopher, DriveSavers’ Director of PR at the SIGGRAPH convention in San Diego California. The average recover costs around $1700 and DriveSavers handles between 1300 and 1500 hard drives a month with a 90% success rate, according to Christopher. The success rate is phenomenal considering that many customers will often make thing worse before sending their drives to the company.

“Customers always do more harm. You’ve got one copy, one chance… why mess around?” said Christopher.

Hard drive head crashes and mechanical failures comprise approximately 60% of DriveSavers’ hard drive recoveries and many computer geeks have heard about freezing the drive to shrink the platters. Basically you pop the hard drive in the freezer overnight and in the morning you quickly attach it to the computer and grab all the data. The theory is that the platters will shrink while cold and become “unstuck” from the drive head or casing, but according to Christopher this is bogus.

“If anyone got it to work, it was pure luck, I can’t find any reasons why it would work and my clean room guys have never gotten it to work,” Christopher told us. He added that water can condense on the hard drive platters after it has been take out of the freezer. “Then you get water spots which is really bad,” he said.

Another myth is you can hit the hard drive when it is spinning up to force it back into working order. “Some people try smacking it on the side while the drive powers up,” said Christopher. That too doesn’t work he said.

And it doesn’t end there because some customers have tried buying identical drives on eBay and then replacing the platters in their bathrooms. “They think that their bathrooms are cleaner,” Christopher told us.

So what’s the craziest data recovery the company has ever done? Christopher said that was a loaded question because most of the drives come with unbelievable stories. The company handles drives that have been burnt in fires, drowned in floods and has even recovered the contents of a PowerBook that sunk in the Amazon River.

Christopher does remember one of the first recoveries which was a student’s only copy of her thesis from a floppy disk.

“She put the disk in her purse and sat down at a bench. She heard a hissing sound which was a Aquanet hairspray can discharging all over her floppy.”

Despite having a sticky cemented disk, DriveSavers fully recovered the document.

Speaking of floppies, the company still receives floppies for recovery. Christopher told us that people even send in ancient 20 to 30 MB RLL/MFM formatted hard drives.

Drive recovery procedures are constantly changing and Christopher told us that increasing drive capacities are making things somewhat more difficult for his engineers. One example is that people are buying computers with a terabyte or more of storage, but that space is actually spanned across two or more drives. This is a big danger is one of the drives dies and takes out the whole array.

“These computer companies don’t say that the drives are spanned. So now the customer has no clue and says ‘I didn’t know I had four drives’”

Incidentally, a very satisfied DriveSavers customer walked up to us during the interview and told us how the company saved his 160 GB hard drive. Jacob Pollack said he first took his drive to an Apple store and their reps botched the job.

“My drive had very important media files and the Apple store just reformatted my drive,” Pollack said. He added that the reps eventually referred him to DriveSavers.

GPS rival to integrate tech for global search and rescue system

Representatives of the Galileo project, Europe's effort to establish a civil global positioning system, have presented an ambitious plan to equip its satellites with a future worldwide search and rescue technology to be able to locate and communicate with individuals in emergency situations anywhere on the globe.

The new project was announced as part of the recent annual Joint Committee Meeting of COSPAS-SARSAT, an international initiative focused on a satellite system for search and rescue. Galileo representatives confirmed that their future satellite system will be equipped with transponders to relay distress signals to search and rescue organizations, as a key technology of MEOSAR (Medium Earth Orbit Search And Rescue), a future worldwide search and rescue satellite system.

What is fascinating about the Galileo system is that it promises to overcome many of the limitations satellite-based rescue systems have today.

COSPAS-SARSAT currently operates a total 12 satellites. Five "Geosar" geostationary satellites orbit in 1000 km altitude: These satellites remain fixed relative to the position of the Earth and have a relatively poor coverage of the polar regions. This deficiency is somewhat covered by seven low-Earth orbit (850 km altitude) "Leosar" satellites circling the Earth around the poles. The major downside of today's system, which went into operation almost 25 years ago on September 10, 1982, is that there can be a substantial delay in relaying distress signals, which currently can be received through beacons at 121.5 MHz and 406 MHz.

The system cannot monitor the complete surface of the Earth at any given moment and depends on a satellite passing a distress signal overhead. In addition, the satellites cannot relay a distress signal to the ground at any given time, but rather have to store the location of the emergency and send it to a base station once there is one in reach. COSPAS-SARSAT says that it can take up to one hour until a signal is received and sent back to the ground.

Also, distress signals need to have a direct line of sight to the satellites, which may not be possible in some situations, especially in accident situations where individuals are trapped in a deep valley and the surrounding terrain obscures the view to the satellite.

Galileo promises to solve these problems, providing a global coverage with about 20 – 30 satellites in medium-Earth orbit. The project promises that the system will be able to monitor even polar regions; the capability of multiple viewing angles is expected to tackle the problem of terrain blocking.

The Galileo search and rescue component will also provide a basic communication component that is absent in the current Geosar and Leosar system. While the "Forward Link Alert Service" is promised to be fully backward compatible with the current operational COSPAS-SARSAT components and interoperable with all other planned MEOSAR elements, detects activated distress beacons and notifies the appropriate rescue body, there is a second feature, called "Return Link Service". This component will allow the satellite to send a return message to the emergency beacon and let individuals know that their distress signal has been received and help is on its way.

Galileo representatives said that four satellites with search and rescue transponders will be used to demonstrate the Galileo MEOSAR services.

Activist group recommends more control over search privacy

Public policy organization The Center For Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report calling for an overhaul of search engine privacy policies.

Once a completely non-glamorous tool for finding content on the Internet, search engines have become the backbone for e-commerce, online advertising, and digital privacy concerns. A few snafus and an increasing desire for privacy have caused giants like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to come under intense scrutiny.

Each of the three big sites has modified or announced plans to modify its privacy policy within the past year, but activists say there's still more work to do. Google and Microsoft, for example, plan to keep track of IP addresses that use their respective search engine for 18 months. Yahoo will keep this information for 13 months. Individual search terms on all three sites will remain in Google's history indefinitely, but will not link the searches to individual users after the user information is deleted.

As part of the report, CDT says search engines need to develop "new standards and policies that take privacy into account from the beginning."

CDT wants the government to step in because it says search sites cannot be trusted. "No amount of seul-regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actotrs," writes the organization.

For the most part, CDT says long-term privacy is secured by all of the big search engines, as they delete unique identifiers to prevent linking search terms back to specific users. It's the short term that becomes worriesome, claims the organization.

Specifically, it says, search-based advertising must be closely monitored. CDT calls for search engines to offer more choices for how their data is stored and used, and that user privacy needs to come first before advertising revenue. This becomes more glaringly important when sharing data between multiple sites, owned by the same company, opens up new concerns.

"As it becomes possible to tie more and more information back to an individual user account, users should control the correlation of their account information with records of their online activities," writes CDT in its report.