Thermal profile: why not every head can be a donor
Two drives of the same model, ten heads each, and only one behaves the same. This is how we choose a donor without putting the platters at risk.
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What hard drive firmware is, and why it cannot be replaced
A damaged board can be replaced; a drive's calibration memory cannot. An analogy to understand why.
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The evolution that changed the rules: SMR, HAMR and the head swap
A research paper from the laboratory: why a head swap that works on a CMR drive can destroy the data on an SMR drive.
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FTL: the invisible layer that makes your SSD, USB stick or SD card work
Between the operating system and the memory chips sits firmware that decides where every piece of data goes. Understanding it explains why SSD recovery is so different.
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How low-level cloning works (and why it is always the first step)
Before touching a single file, we clone the device bit by bit. This is the technical reason that order never changes.
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Clean room: why a hard drive should only be opened in a controlled environment
The head flies nanometres above the platter: a speck of dust can scratch it. What a clean room is, and how we open a drive.
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Ransomware recovery: how a company was back in operation within 48 hours
An attack encrypted a mid-sized company's file server on a Friday night. By Monday they were operating again.
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How we recovered a RAID 5 with two failed drives at a logistics company
Two drives failed over the same weekend and the dispatch system stopped. This is how we rebuilt the array without losing data.
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Ransomware: a step-by-step guide to the first few hours
Isolate, identify and decide without paying blind: the right sequence for responding to a ransomware attack.
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What to do (and what NOT to do) in the first 24 hours after losing your data
The decisions you take in the first few hours decide whether your data is recoverable at all. Here is what to do and what to avoid.
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