[ale] Hard Drive data recovery services?

[JD]

On 05/30/2013 10:14 AM, Pete Hardie wrote:
> Just a follow-up on my HDD recovery saga
> 
> I was able to use ddrescue and a borrowed USB-SATA cable to access the drive,
> and recovered all but 17M of 500G, if I understand the output of ddrescue.  I'm
> in the process of dropping the recovered photos, etc to DVD so that we have real
> backup copies, and my wife can restore those that she wants on her machine at
> her leisure.
> 
> Thanks again for all the pointers and advice - it looks like I'm able to get
> most if not all of what we thought was lost.

DVDs and other optical storage devices fail all the time too.

When storing data to CD/DVD I always add 10% parity files using par2.  This has
aided recovery of about 1% of the files at a later time. Some of this media is
over 10 yrs old and still viable for reading. when a single issue happens, I
pull all the data off and reburn it, with new parity files, to new media.  In
thousands of recovery attempts, only 1 file has been lost forever after both the
file AND the parity files were too corrupt.

Sort of a funny story, but had a non-technical friend that believed she was
being very savvy by backing up everything critical to an external USB spinning
disk.  So far, so good.

Then she'd delete the original files from her computer, since they were "backed
up" and safe now.  Arrrrrg!!!!!