Fields Data Recovery Blog

For the past several months techy publications and blogs have been rife with reports of new ways to store and stream data. The concept of storing data on a virtual, rather than physical, server is nothing new, of course, but with both Microsoft and Apple now offering online storage to users of some of its most popular products – such as iPhones and the Xbox 360 – cloud storage looks set to penetrate the mainstream.

On the face of it, things seem relatively straightforward; you pay a hosting company to either buy or lease some online storage space and, in turn, you can save your data on the hosting company’s virtual servers. It’s not dissimilar to placing household items in storage whilst you redecorated your house, the obvious exceptions being that you’re not storing any physical items and that you’re unlikely to actually see where your data is stored.

Seems perfect doesn’t it? Well… no, not entirely. The security risks associated with cloud storage are well documented and trusting a third party with sensitive data constitutes a leap of faith that many businesses and individuals are unlikely to be willing to take. The fact that one user’s files would be stored on the same hardware as another user creates further concern. If one user’s files become corrupted, it is only logical to conclude that another user’s data will become corrupted also.

The concept of cloud storage remains in its infancy and, as a result, its reliability, sustainability and ability to provide a secure form of storage remain unproven. Until these concerns are addressed and storage providers are able to comprehensively dispel the security concerns associated with their product, then, for the time being at least, physical media is likely to remain as the main means of storing electronic data.

Fields Data Recovery statistics are coming soon. Just bear with us for a few more days…

Our customer services team collated the statistics for our customer satisfaction statistics last week and it looks like March was another good month for Fields Data Recovery.

The bottom line is that only 1.07% of the thousands of individuals and businesses who sent media to Fields in Month made a formal complaint. Of those complaints all but one have now been resolved. Additionally, the figure drops to 0.52% when you consider all the clients who we were under contract with.

Over the last 12 months we have introduced many new procedures and quality control checks (one of the reasons we passed our ISO 9001 assessment with flying colours no doubt!)  including added security for customers data during the backup and dispatch phases of the data recovery process. Some of these changes include MD5 hash checking of all data at point of recovery and point of disptach; this, with others contributed to a significant fall in returns over the last three months.

Another change is our quality control checks where an independent member of staff (someone not involved in speaking with the customer or recovering the data) looks at the product sold, data recovered, job logs etc and performs one final QC check before dispatch.

Fields Data Recovery’s commitment to customer service is aided by the resource and facilities we have at our disposal and we hope to improve these good results even further throughout the remainder of 2011.

Hello all,

The first quarter of 2011 has been a very interesting one for Fields Data Recovery.

So far, we have seen a huge increase in requests for work and have really ramped up our R&D operations, especially within our forensics and SSD/Flash data recovery areas.

Over the next few weeks we should see some important updates to the Fields Data Recovery websites as well; our customers have been great over the last few months in sending in hundreds of testimonials that we haven’t yet uploaded! In addition to that we have a whole years of statistics that the Fields engineers have recorded which provide for some interesting reading.

The main area of focus so far this year has been our SSD/Flash and forensics divisions. However, we must be careful not to give the impression that we’re neglecting what is ultimately the bulk of our work – mechanical hard disk drive recoveries.

This type of work is probably accounts for the vast majority of work undertaken in UK recovery labs – well, it certainly is for Fields Data Recovery anyway – with at least 70% of work we do being on mechanical HDDs and over 85% of those disks coming from less than half a dozen manufacturers we have accumulated tens of thousands of stats which we will be discussing here in the coming weeks.

All the best.

Fields

“Hard disk data recovery probably wasn’t at the top of the issues list until it was too late!” is the typical regret that most IT managers express after suffering data loss. Fields Data Recovery and their industry competitors deal with customers at a time when an unexpected strain is placed on their budgets and cash flow; now whilst most data recovery companies charge between a couple and a few hundred pounds for a standard recovery most of you will probably think “huh, no big deal,” but, it’s not the bill from our recovery lab that concerns most corporate bosses but a complete shock that their risk management didn’t pick up this seemingly obvious flaw.

Most companies back up. Most companies back up their data on a regular basis. But we still see thousands of disks every month come to us because backup cycles just can’t meet the rate at which data becomes important. One of Fields Data Recovery’s newest account managers was shocked at his first customer encounter – an accounts clerk who lost two days of data and just had no way of recreating it! In that instance the twice weekly backup to tape just couldn’t match. In any event do you really think that you can remove the risk of data loss at a rate at which you create it? Probably not.

This highlights the importance of raising awareness of the many ISO certified clean labs around the UK and Europe that can facilitate recovery in the event of data loss exceeding data backup. With ever increasing service levels and turnaround times and with some labs (like Fields Data Recovery) running 24hour operations (round the clock use of lab space and recovery equipment) means that we are finding our service can often compete with retrieving the files from backup!

So, shockingly we had two clients last week where Fields not only beat off other data recovery companies but also beat off the offsite backup. This was because we could provide a two hour turnaround with express data transfer thanks to our 1 Gigabit leased line we were able to diagnose, recover and return data faster that the service levels offered by their offsite data warehouse.

If anyone ever experiences data loss then remember that complete recovery could be just hours away and doesn’t have to cost the earth.