Data With a Drip
Data With a Drip

23 September 2022

Spotted in the lab. This one needed a bit of specific pre-recovery work.

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Sounds Like Something Is Wrong...
Sounds Like Something Is Wrong...

14 April 2022

Hard drive making weird noises suddenly? Watch a clip from the recovery lab and you be the judge.

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How Do You Pronounce Data?
How Do You Pronounce Data?

19 November 2021

After watching a handy pronunciation guide video we pondered our own preferences around the office & lab in how to say the word ‘data’. A Star Trek friend also weighed in.

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Throwback: Creating the First Hard Disk Drive at IBM
Throwback: Creating the First Hard Disk Drive at IBM

3 July 2020

A promotional film that IBM made in the 1950s looks at the creation of the first hard disk drive and is a retro video throwback to tech innovation and marketing of the time reminding us how far we’ve come and of artifacts from our own data recovery archives.

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Data Recovery D-I-WHY
Data Recovery D-I-WHY

13 April 2018

Submitted for your approval, one enthusiastic amateur. Put on earth with a screwdriver, a broken drive, and wholly too much time on his hands. In a moment, we will be shown a miracle brought by magical DVD lasers. Although it’s a fact that he should have trusted the professionals, he will tempt fate by converting a 500GB hard drive to a 1GB Linux boot CD, in… The Recovery Zone.

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Data Recovery on TV - Halt and Caught Fire
Data Recovery on TV - Halt and Caught Fire

19 October 2017

We always love to see data recovery in TV and movies. Real problems, techno-babble, and magical solutions. One of our favorite shows is AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, chronicling the rise of early 80’s IBM-compatible development right up to the information superhighway of the 1990’s.

We’ve covered this show before; back in the first season one of the main characters has to call in his wife Donna (a better engineer than himself) to help with a burned hard drive, and she saves the data, and the day.

In the series finale episode we see Donna again tackling data recovery, this time for her desperate and distraught daughter.

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How to Demolish Old Hard Drive Data (keeping your data safe, the logical way)
How to Demolish Old Hard Drive Data (keeping your data safe, the logical way)

24 March 2016

Hammering, drilling, slicing and vyse-ing your way to Data Destruction

If you have a computer that you are getting rid of you need to take special care of the data you have stored inside it. Whatever information you have saved on the hard drive inside: photos, documents, financial files, passwords, emails — personal information, does not simply go away if you hit delete or drop stuff in the Recycle Bin.

Ben Popken at NBC did a video showing some low-tech solutions to this problem. He trashes hard drives with everything from hammers and baseball bats, to submerging in water and burning with fire. Watch the video after the jump.

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Crikey! That's a Big Hard Drive Teardown
Crikey! That's a Big Hard Drive Teardown

11 September 2015

Look at the size of this hard drive – and we’re not talking about its capacity. No, not the ones pictured here…..watch the video after the jump to see the vintage.

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Data Recovery on TV - Halt and Catch Fire
Data Recovery on TV - Halt and Catch Fire

8 September 2014

Every once in a while we catch our work being captured and ‘interpreted’ in the fictional world of tv and movies. One instance we noted recently is in AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. Set in the early 1980s PC revolution, the chance of seeing some hard drive-related data drama was high.

Scene from AMC's Halt and Catch Fire

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High-Profile Data Destruction: Snowden Hard Drives Destroyed by Guardian Editors
High-Profile Data Destruction: Snowden Hard Drives Destroyed by Guardian Editors

31 January 2014

Remains of a PC destroyed by Guardian staff to clear themselves of Snowden leak data; Photo:Guardian

Back in July during peak moments of the Edward Snowden leak scandal explosion around the world, the UK’s Guardian newspaper was embroiled in a battle with government about the information in the paper’s possession. Government officials and the GCHQ spy agency threatened injunctions against the paper. Finally staff decided they had to destroy all the computers to prevent their journalists being carted away and measures being taken against the paper.

See footage of the destruction after the jump

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How did Toronto Police Recover the Deleted Rob Ford Crack Video?
How did Toronto Police Recover the Deleted Rob Ford Crack Video?

1 November 2013

So how did the police department get the deleted data of the mysterious video files from the hard drives? In a story stunning Toronto yesterday and spreading beyond Canada into news media around the globe, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair admitted that a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking what appears to be a crack pipe had been recovered. The video, never been seen by the public, has been the subject of a great deal of speculation since some photos from it were reported in the press earlier in the year. Mayor Ford received a torrent of allegations about its supposed contents and flatly denied it even existed. A bombshell of sorts yesterday when the Police Chief exclaimed that evidence seized in a series of police raids contained electronic devices and computer hard drives that after months of investigation contained the video in question. According to Blair, the footage is “consistent with what has been described in the media,” but he will not further describe what depictions are there. So how did the police department get the deleted data of the mysterious video files from the hard drives?

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Data Loss Toy Story - Crisis at Pixar Averted
Data Loss Toy Story - Crisis at Pixar Averted

14 May 2012

This starts off sounding like every customer phone call we get every day. Pixar Animation Studio’s brush with a data loss disaster during the making of their film Toy Story 2.

Click through to watch this great video!

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Data Recovery Myth Busting: Hard Drive Platters
Data Recovery Myth Busting: Hard Drive Platters

17 November 2010

We come across misconceptions about what we do all the time.

Some keep coming up time and time again, and we thought that we better take charge and dispel some of the ideas out there.

ancient hard drive cave art

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Strobeshnik hard drive clock
Strobeshnik hard drive clock

8 March 2010

We can definitely appreciate coming up with creative uses of old hard drives here at CBL.

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Data is Resilient, Don't Underestimate Haiti Recovery Effort
Data is Resilient, Don't Underestimate Haiti Recovery Effort

15 January 2010

Natural disasters around the world like the recent earthquake in Haiti all have serious impacts on the communities they affect. At CBL we have stood by emergency personnel and offered our particular expertise in restoring mission-critical data to ravaged areas and we are ready to assist again.

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CBL Pro-V Data Recovery Software Now Features Windows 7 Compatibility
CBL Pro-V Data Recovery Software Now Features Windows 7 Compatibility

11 November 2009

With the official release of Microsoft Windows 7 the following question was inevitable: Can I run your data recovery software on Windows 7?

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Video: Scams report reminds Not All Data Recovery Firms Are Created Equal
Video: Scams report reminds Not All Data Recovery Firms Are Created Equal

31 July 2009

Video of the week goes to this brief investigative report FOX News in Los Angeles did on data recovery companies. The report covers customers’ experiences with some local data recovery firms and the questionable analysis of a crashed hard drive with data loss. It exposes potential risks to your privacy, data and pocketbook.

Watch the video after the jump

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Video: Behind-the-Scenes of a CBL Lab
Video: Behind-the-Scenes of a CBL Lab

17 March 2009

CEO of CBL Data Recovery Technologies takes you behind the scenes touring one of our worldwide labs. Video after the jump.

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CBL Adventures: Part 3
CBL Adventures: Part 3

10 March 2009

Sometimes lives literally depend on successful data recoveries. Take for example a 25 drive RAID array that crashes on New Year’s Eve and you have a disaster on your hands.

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CBL Adventures: Part 2
CBL Adventures: Part 2

6 March 2009

Mud and water was not enough to prevent CBL from recovering engineering schematics for a town in Venezuela. After the jump, watch video of CEO Bill Margeson telling the story of this data recovery adventure.

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CBL Adventures: Part 1
CBL Adventures: Part 1

4 March 2009

President, co-founder, and CEO Bill Margeson describes an encounter with Russian hackers and a CBL data recovery project.

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The Computer Mechanics talk Backup and Data Loss
The Computer Mechanics talk Backup and Data Loss

13 August 2008

You Can’t Use it if you Lose It: A prequel episode of The Computer Mechanics where they talk data backup and data loss

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Dawn of the Tera Era
Dawn of the Tera Era

28 July 2008

Hitachi is forecasting the dawn of a new age in storage technology that it has dubbed the “Tera Era”. Watch below with sound!

Visit http://www.hitachigst.com/teraera

Video: The evolution of drives and data recovery
Video: The evolution of drives and data recovery

27 June 2007


CBL Data Recovery CEO, Bill Margeson, talks about the evolution of the hard drive, common hard drive failure symptoms and data recovery techniques.

From the set of CH-Morning Live, Hamilton, ON, Canada