Doing your drive in
December 8th 2007 05:55
You may have heard of the Darwin Awards: awards for people who’ve done extremely silly things with their bodies, or with tools and equipment, and who, in most cases, have wound up dead as a result.
Computerworld annually lists the crazy things people do with computer equipment. Usually the people survive, but the computers don’t.
One woman accidentally put her USB stick (or zip drive) in the washing machine, and was somewhat surprised to find all her data had been washed away. Amazingly, Kroll Inc’s Ontrack Data Recovery Unit were able to recover the data.
A British scientist got fed up with the squeaking noise his hard drive was making. With great scientific wisdom he drilled a hole into the casing and poured oil. Everything stopped.
When a wedding photographer overwrote the photos he’d taken of one wedding with another, he thought he’d be facing wrath from the bride and groom. In fact, the data recovery specialists actually restored the original photos.
Perhaps the strangest incident was when a computer user in Thailand found ants in his external hard drive. The man took the cover off the drive and sprayed insect repellent on it. Both the ants and the drive died.
But the Data Recovery specialists don’t give up easily; they actually recovered the data from this drive.
Kroll Inc is based in Australia, but now has offices in over 30 countries. I’d always thought that data lost on zip drives, hard drives and any other possible drives was gone for good. I should have known that if deleted files can be found easily enough, data is only a step further along the track. Now that I know about them, I’ll keep Kroll in mind. (This isn’t an ad for them, by the way – I’m just impressed by what they can do!)
Computerworld annually lists the crazy things people do with computer equipment. Usually the people survive, but the computers don’t.
One woman accidentally put her USB stick (or zip drive) in the washing machine, and was somewhat surprised to find all her data had been washed away. Amazingly, Kroll Inc’s Ontrack Data Recovery Unit were able to recover the data.
A British scientist got fed up with the squeaking noise his hard drive was making. With great scientific wisdom he drilled a hole into the casing and poured oil. Everything stopped.
When a wedding photographer overwrote the photos he’d taken of one wedding with another, he thought he’d be facing wrath from the bride and groom. In fact, the data recovery specialists actually restored the original photos.
Perhaps the strangest incident was when a computer user in Thailand found ants in his external hard drive. The man took the cover off the drive and sprayed insect repellent on it. Both the ants and the drive died.
But the Data Recovery specialists don’t give up easily; they actually recovered the data from this drive.
Kroll Inc is based in Australia, but now has offices in over 30 countries. I’d always thought that data lost on zip drives, hard drives and any other possible drives was gone for good. I should have known that if deleted files can be found easily enough, data is only a step further along the track. Now that I know about them, I’ll keep Kroll in mind. (This isn’t an ad for them, by the way – I’m just impressed by what they can do!)
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