Data recovery service in Manchester

UK data recovery experts Datlabs have launched a new look web site for their hard drive recovery business. The growth of the site reflects the growth in their hard drive data recovery business over the last 18 months or so.

I called Datlabs to ask them about their new web site and how they are fairing in the complex world of data recovery. “We have seen a huge upturn in the amount of work being sent in to us where portable and external USB hard drives have broken” said Datlabs tech wizard Ashley Gomes. “Whereas only 5 years ago we would see comparatively few external and portable data storage devices, we now see an increase of almost 5 fold.”

This is a statistic that is common amongst many data recovery companies the world over: external hard drives are just so much more popular these days, and the fact that they are portable means they get lugged around from place to place and get knocked and dropped.

“Inside the casing a hard drive is a very delicate storage device”, continued Gomes, “a jolt or knock can cause real problems with accessibilty, whilst dropping and external hard drive can result in the data being lost forever”.

With the likes of web sites http://thursdaynightblues.com/ and http://harddriveman.com/ reporting on many different types of hard drive fault, Datlabs should be busy, and their new site rocks!

Storing data on a hard drive may appear quite complex to the normal person. Through a chain of comparisons, photos and simple to comprehend technical terms, I’ll describe just what a hard drive is, the specialized jargon associated with the parts of the hard drive and what occurs when data is saved to that hard drive.

Data recovery on Western Digital hard drives (http://www.wdc.com) often have a turnaround time of anywhere between seven days to a month (see http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/western-digital-data-recovery/). The fact that they frequently ask that you mail in your device limits the quickest turnaround time accessible. Recovery applications can work (if it works) in less than thirty minutes from download to recovery. Many of the businesses that advertise quick turnaround rates for hands on data recovery are still talking about days, not minutes.

A data recovery service that doesn’t deliver the files you desire back will be nothing but time squandered. Any quality brand of hard disk (eg. Western Digital or Maxtor) recovery program will do what it says it will. In case you go through the jobs of getting and installing the application and end up with nothing, it may be the instance you have to spend a lot more money to buy a data recovery service.

In the event your PC is not booting, you can try booting it in safe mode and try to disable or uninstall any lately installed applications that may have caused the problem. You can even try to see if running a System Restore solves the situation, but be careful as this will lose all the data on the hard drive.

When you’re successful with the Western Digital hard drive data recovery, then you will want to consider other data back-up alternatives. For personal computers, you can use an external hard drive or another small storage item. Office computers on a network will take advantage of a distant recovery data facility that can back-up all the files on their network and keep all the changes upgraded. It Is a paid service, but one well worth the cost. This way, you’ll be able to avoid needing to manage another close call with data loss.

I don’t know about you, but these days the family environment is a busy one when it comes to IT and computers. My eldest daughter has her own laptop and my youngest daughter has an IPad. They both have smartphones too. As well and texting and all the other things teenagers use their mobile phones for, they also take a lot of photographs that want to save.

Saving this data on the family iMac was fine – there was plenty os space and it was an easy thing to achieve but as time went by there was more and more data to store – more photos, more videos and now music too. Using the internet to search for an answer to my problem, my attention was drawn to Network Attached Storage, otherwise known as NAS. Basically these are devices that connect to the router in your house an allow anyone connected to that router to use them. Great I thought – I’ll get one of those !

So I did, everyone was happy. It came in a nice box with a link to Datlabs NAS Data Recovery Services, who I could call if I needed any technical assistance setting the NAS up and getting it working correctly. I just plugged it in, typed our password and it installed itself on our network. The first thing to do was to transfer all our photos, videos and music data from our family Mac onto the NAS. That was easy – a simple drag and drop operation saw that completed without any problems. There was a lot of data – some 50GB or so… How do teenagers make so much data?? All of which was of course, essential to them.

Anyway with that done I set about cleaning the Mac up and deleting files and folders. Another 30 minutes or so and this was completed. The first thug I noticed was the the machine began to run a lot quicker – which was a result I was very pleased with.

Next I took a look at the configuration of our new NAS device. It’s a 4 disk Linux based storage device that runs RAID 5. This means that the data it holds is spread across the whole 4 disks instead of one. That’s a bit odd I thought but after closer investigation I learned that this was infact a good thing. It allows one drive to fail and my data to still survive without being lost. RAID 5 also provide enhanced data read speeds too – something that was evident from the moment we began using our NAS file server concurrently. My daughters could watch their movies while I was able to stream music from it. This all worked fine – something that we could never do before on the Mac as it was just not quick enough.

So introducing a NAS RAID file server into our home environment has been a great success. Installing it was easy and I didn’t need to contact Datlabs for help in setting it up, I do think I’ll keep their link though just incase anything happens to the NAS that I can’t sort out myself.