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Data recovery: The option of last resort

by Robert Palmer Jan 22nd 2009 at 8:00AM

There is no shortage of stories here on TUAW (and elsewhere) that extol the benefits of backing up your data. Apple even makes it ridiculously easy to do so -- with Mac OS X 10.5, Time Machine, a blank drive, and some spare time, you're set.

Nevertheless, despite your best efforts, there are unforeseen circumstances where you might need to utter those dreaded words: "I need to send this for data recovery." Perhaps your airplane landed in the Hudson river, and your waterlogged laptop was stuck with your luggage. Perhaps an external disk is suffering from a manufacturing defect. Perhaps your backup disk is the disk that failed.

Unfortunately, there is no way to sugar-coat this: Data recovery is a painful, patience-trying, and absurdly expensive process. But if it's the only way to recover mission-critical data, it could be your only option.

It was for me.

I had an Iomega external drive that was given to me as a going-away present after I left the agency where I used to work. I'd worked for the previous five years on Iomega's retail packaging, so it was the company's way of saying "thank you." An additional 750GB of storage was going to be very much needed as I started my freelancing career.

I had connected the drive to my AirPort Extreme base station, so I could share its contents between my iMac and my MacBook. I moved most of my movies, music, and client project files onto the drive. And for a few months, it was a perfect solution. (Cue dramatic music.)

Doing this, however, I was unwittingly walking the high-wire without a safety net.

One day, the disk wouldn't mount. Concerned, I shut it down, unplugged it from the base station, and plugged it in via USB to my iMac. It didn't mount there, either. The alarm bells in my mind started to go off. In a blog entry for that day, I wrote: "Poopie. Poopie poopie poopie."

After letting the drive cool off for a while, I attempted to mount the disk again. No dice. Disk Utility recognized that there was a physical disk connected to the computer, but no logical partitions on the disk. Disk Utility was unable to repair the problems on the disk, so I moved to DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior said the drive directory was "too damaged" to be repaired.

I blanched. I had no backup. I had no plan. All I had was a chunk of metal and plastic that I knew had my data on it, but was too damaged for me to get to. I needed professional help. So, I investigated data recovery options.

On to Part II



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There is no shortage of stories here on TUAW (and elsewhere) that extol the benefits of backing up your data. Apple even makes it...
 

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caleb

I just sent my drive off for recovery...I was in middle of making space on an external (deleting duplicates between the drives) when the failure occurred.

January 23 2009 at 5:37 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

Spinrite can attempt to find bad bits and relocate them, it is filesystem agnostic.

One thing worth mentioning is HFS's issues with layout corruption. I don't know the details how it happens, but it's common. You didn't mention if you tried the GNU hfsplus.fsck before sending in for recovery.
The good news is ZFS is much less prone to this. Zfs by default has 2 copies of meta data in different locations. So if you get bad sectors at the front of a drive, it will likely still mount and be browseable. But if you only have one data copy, data in the bad areas is still gone.

January 23 2009 at 2:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alan

I had a RAID-0 disk fail (stupid me) with a back-up system that had some glitches in it (really stupid me). I looked at lots of ways to recover the data--but one thing I found out is that most recovery software looks for contiguous blocks on the disk and tries to guess the file type. The files I needed to recover were all > 2GB in size (.psb files), and hence were all by necessity split among > 1 piece on the disk. I never was able to recover them, but have re-created some of them as necessary.

January 23 2009 at 1:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
now4real954

edit: JACKASS...sorry your word was so much better than mine...peace

January 22 2009 at 10:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
now4real954

oh my god...thank you Michael Rose...some people have alot of nerve to continue to be an ass and expect to be rewarded for it

if anyone is the MORON here it is YOU "mentalsticks"

you need to get a grip and move the f**k on...

TUAW has the most real and caring writers and staff...unlike the boring and stale Macworld.com...

Michael you rock...i love the new hires and the new articles coming from those writers...and Robert is a staple that i hope we never lose here on TUAW...

thanks again for being my number ONE RSS feed...and i wait with bells on for my Mail.app to show there is more to see from you guys...LOVE TUAW...and calling him an asshole was the best ever!!!

January 22 2009 at 10:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Thug

I don't understand how you were "walking the high wire" just by sharing your drive wirelessly. How would this cause a problem?

January 22 2009 at 10:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
TechGaijin

I went for years without a reliable backup system. I tried using Retrospect, by Dantz, and then Apple's Backup utility from the late .Mac, but both of them required that little bit more human intervention than I really had the discipline to deal with.

I finally got a Time Capsule last year (see full story at http://www.threelionstech.com/blog/?p=25); while I have sympathy with anyone who loses data (I did, once, nearly ten years ago, and never will again, I hope...), these days there's really no excuse...

January 22 2009 at 7:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Hoelzer

I just went down this road with a Western Digital MyBook. I've got a nice writeup on some first steps for self-recovery posted up on my blog that might help others. Security of your information has become the top priority for everyone these days!

See here: http://www.enclaveforensics.com/Blog/files/6c8ff926c4507ba328b1f59fda717de5-20.html
or here: http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/first-response-recovering-a-dying-hard-drive/

January 22 2009 at 11:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
William

I did everything I was supposed to for safeguarding my data. I had a back up disk, and I regularly archived client files onto DVD for an additional layer of peace of mind.

Well last Monday my back up drive failed. I was not to bothered due to the fact that it was a redundant drive. I had to wait to the weekend to get a new drive due to my workload that week. Then Friday at 5:07PM my main drive failed. Now my drive is at a data recovery centre and I need to pay them $1500 for the recovery. To make matters worth I went to look for some of the archived client files on the Backup DVD's and all I got on 3 out of ten of the disk was a spinning non mounting disk...I am not sure what to do now. Is the a better way for long term back ups? Tape is so so because over time the tape oxides and loses the data as well.

I have lost my faith in digital all methods of digital storage.

JP

January 22 2009 at 11:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to William's comment
Rob

JP,

Optical Media is not a reliable long term storage medium. But if you use it, make sure you do not skip the VERIFY stage after the medium is burned. (You may need to turn on the VERIFY stage in the Preferences of your Burning Program). As please note that some claim that certain optical mediums (CD-R's etc) may not work after 5 years of so.

In my view, the best backup available today is an EXTERNAL Hard disk. They are getting really inexpensive these days. And in my experience are a lot more reliable as a backup storage medium than floppy disks or optical mediums like CD-R's or DVD-R's.

January 22 2009 at 11:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SCK

Nice write up of the reasons for backup. But, I am amazed that you had to spend the $1,500...

Having done this many times, there is some "hidden" truths about the process of data recovery.

1) Iomega already did the data recovery BEFORE they sent you the Word Document. So, they already had your data before they told you they would try to recover the files.
2) If you have a harddrive device (readable) with a bad filesystem (unreadable) then you can use the standard UNIX utility 'dd' to copy the drive data (as is), to another drive for safe keeping.
3) Once, you have that copy you can then try using various FREE utilities like PhotoRec ( see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec for more details) to recover your files without filenames attached. (Just reads the drive for thing that look like PDF, DOC, JPG, GIF, etc...
4) Or you can use DiskWarrior, SpinRite, or DataRescue II (etc) to then attempt to re-build the filesystem structures and then copy the data.
5) In all cases, you should ALWAYS backup your data daily/weekly/monthly (whatever works for you) and you should also backup any drive BEFORE you try to "fix" it with Disk Util or Disk Warrior. What if they "broke it worse"?

Lastly, all of this and more is available in some presentations done by Scott Moulton at DefCon and ToorCon which are online at http://myharddrivedied.com/presentations/

Scott Kennedy (no relation to Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com)

January 22 2009 at 11:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to SCK's comment
Rob

Scott,

For damaged hard disks, gnu ddrescue is MUCH better than the standard dd. gnu ddrescue uses many of the same tricks as the expensive Spinrite to read and recover bad sectors. Best of all gnu ddrescue is free.

Most of the time gnu ddrescue does the trick. If not, you can use other great free utilities like PhotoRec you mentioned. As you know, PhotoRec is an awlful name. It recovers MORE than just photos.

January 22 2009 at 11:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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