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Has Your Hard Drive Been Damaged In The Floods?

We have received a number of requests for help and information at this time of recovery and repair from the terrible flooding events in Queensland and Victoria.

Here is some good advice from the Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery experts.

  1. Do not attempt to power up equipment damaged by water. If water has infiltrated the hard drive or electrical components, electrical power can leave the hard drive unrecoverable and it can become dangerous to anyone handling the hard drive.
  2. Do Not Dry the Hard Drive. Whenever media is damaged by water, the first instinct to remedy the situation and try and dry it out. However, the contaminants contained in water are often not visible to the human eye and will damage the media irrevocably. Residue left on the hard drive platters and circuit board corrosion will need to be treated by in-lab professional engineers.
  3. Keep the hard disk wet until you get professional help. Although it sounds paradoxical [crazy], keeping a hard drive wet aids the data recovery. Kroll Ontrack recommends placing the hard disk in a sealed container or plastic bag to prevent it drying out until professional engineers can dry the platters and other components in a sterile environment.
  4. Never assume that data is unrecoverable. No matter what it has been through data can sometimes still be recovered. Amongst the most remarkable case histories is NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia hard drive which plunged into a lake after travelling for 39 miles through space. Kroll Ontrack engineers managed to recover 99 per cent of the information stored on the drive.

Special Data Recovery Service Option

Kroll Ontrack is also providing a heavily discounted flat fee of $850 per hard drive for desktop, laptop, notebook and external hard drive recoveries. [The usual price for this service can range up to $2,400 per drive.]In addition, Kroll Ontrack is offering a 20% discount on recovery of servers, Storage Area Networks (SANs), VMware and tape media.

Kroll Ontrack Australia – Business As Usual

We were lucky our data recovery cleanroom is in West End, Brisbane and whilst the water came very close we were unaffected by the floods. We are the only data recovery company in Australia to offer a full suite of recovery solutions, enabling data recovery anywhere, anytime for any operating system, storage or media type and cause of data loss.

1 Comment

  1. Amanda

    This is a good check-list. Thanks for posting it. This is all so scary and devastating. It is good to try and minimize the damage where possible. Good on ya.

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