CBL Pictures: Easy to See Not-So Hot Fate for Not-So Burnt Hard Drives
CBL Pictures: Easy to See Not-So Hot Fate for Not-So Burnt Hard Drives

27 August 2021

Throwback to this pair of fire-burned drives spotted in the lab whose not-so hot fate was pretty easily determined early into the recovery project.

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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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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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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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