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Data Recovery Experts Cleaning Up
The Australian - IT Today
October 24, 2006
By Simon Hayes
THE popularity of digital cameras and the growth in portable storage is driving demand for data recovery services, with firms charging up to $3500 to pull data from fried drives.
The recovery sector - traditionally serving small businesses that lose non-duplicated financial records and customer files - is booming because of digital media and consumers with lost photos and videos.
"I had a call at 2.30am from a guy who had deleted 44GB of photos from a world trip," said Payam Toloo, chief executive of Sydney firm Payam Data Recovery.
"He was really stressed because he had stored it at work and then deleted it, thinking he had it backed up at home, but he hadn't," Mr Toloo said.
"He brought the work server in, and needed to have it back by 7am."
That job, which took an hour and a half, cost $945.
It is relatively cheap to recover data lost due to accidental deletions and corrupted file systems, but the big bucks start flowing when hardware problems are involved.
"Some customers say they don't care what it costs. I like that," Mr Toloo said.
Hardware problems range from head crashes to scratched disks.
Crashes can usually be fixed, as can come minor scratches. The work is expensive because the company uses its own clean room to work on the drives, and has special technology to examine disk platters.
One firm sacked a worker after it found child pornography on his computer, but then brought the PC to Mr Toloo for data recovery after the worker took action for wrongful dismissal. The data was recovered and forwarded to police.
Another business lost all its data in a fire and the tape back-up was destroyed despite being in a fireproof safe. The data was recovered.
Small businesses are big business for data recovery firms, mainly due to a lacklustre approach to back-up.
"Small businesses don't back up at all. We have lawyers and business people who lose email when their system crash, and they want them back," Mr Toloo said.
Data recovery is often an emotional business, especially when personal memories are involved.
"Women get very emotional about their computers, and they come in crying and stressed," Mr Toloo said.
There is also plenty of drama in the business. Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries motorcycle manager Ray Newland had his laptop run over after hopping out of a taxi.
Mr Newland had not backed up and the computer maker told him the data could not be retrieved, but Mr Toloo's business recovered the lot.
Graham van Leeuwen, operations manager for a Sydney medical equipment firm, is another of the company's success stories. "It's amazing how many times you tell yourself you should back up. Then you don't, and get into strife. I was in tears," he said.
Even professionals get caught out from time to time. Paul Buchtmann, who runs customer relationship management software consultancy Act Today, lost $10,000 worth of work when his laptop hard drive crashed.
He schedules a backup for every second day, but frequent travel meant he was not always able to do it.
"I had a laptop that was less than a year old," he said. "One morning, there was nothing. It didn't fire up at all," he said.
"Everyone knows you have to back up, but most people don't do it because they don't understand the implications of losing data."
Ironically, while solid-state storage is billed as highly reliable, much of Payam's work is coming from iPods and flash-memory sticks.
"One thing that did scare me a little was when Toshiba released a disk it said was crash-proof," Mr Toloo said. "But the fastest-growing part of the business is USB flash, particularly from power surges."
Because there are few courses in data recovery, most companies in the field train their own staff.
"We look for an interest in hardware, computers as a hobby, that sort of thing," said Vicky Brauner, managing director of Brisbane firm CBL Data Recovery.
"Then we do our own training."
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