Recovered data from SD cards, HDDs, SSDs and RAID

Situation. People turned up with storage that had failed or been damaged, and data on it they urgently needed back — and by the time someone’s carrying a dead drive into a shop, they’re usually past worried and into panicking. Photos, business files, the only copy of something that mattered.

Task. Recovering their data, across whatever media they walked in with, was the job.

Action. Data recovery ran across pretty much every common storage type — SD cards, spinning HDDs, SSDs, RAID arrays, external drives, Mac systems. Each of those fails and gives up its data differently: an SSD is a different problem from a platter drive, a RAID array is a different problem again, and a Mac filesystem has its own quirks. So the work was as much about knowing the right approach for the specific medium as it was about any single technique.

Result. Clients got critical data back from devices they’d already written off as gone, across every common kind of storage. There’s a specific relief on someone’s face when you hand back the drive with their files intact — that was the point of the work, and it happened across the whole range of media.