Data recovery case studies

Barclays Wealth - Red-Hot Laptop - Disc-o Inferno! - Groundbreaking Shuffle Recovery

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Barclays Wealth

Barclays Wealth offers a bespoke wealth management service for client assets worth over £133bn worldwide

Barclays Wealth is using Kroll Ontrack’s Power Controls to restore and consolidate emails from a variety of various email platforms. Jason Summan, head of Unified Communications has to manage restoring communications from Exchange 2003 and the more archaic Exchange 5.5. Jason has used PowerControls for over seven years and deals with over 15 requests for restores a month.

“Power Controls provides a simple and straightforward way in which to retrieve Exchange mailbox data with minimum fuss. Previously corrupted databases or complex restores could mean a day’s job for an administrator. The ability to restore quickly and efficiently enables the IT team to rapidly respond to demands, but also frees up time for more proactive tasks.”

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Red-Hot Laptop…

The laptop itself, as shown in the photograph (yes I know it doesn’t look much like a laptop any more), was sent in, and is a true testament to the workings of the Kroll Ontrack Clean Room.
It is no exaggeration to say that every clean room engineer had some input into the recovery of this drive.

Often, complex jobs such as this are a collaborative effort between several engineers (as with many regular jobs). It is never a simple case of following normal recovery procedures. With these jobs, it is commonplace for ideas to be thrown around, and different scenarios to be talked through.
As you can see from the picture, the drive - and laptop - had suffered severe fire damage, in addition to being dowsed by water afterwards.

Following hours of painstaking cleaning, and other high-tech recovery procedures, we managed to get the drive working again. Not only that, but we managed to recover an astounding 99% of the lost data.

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Disc-o Inferno!

We see a lot of weird and wonderful things coming through our doors, but none give an engineer more satisfaction than recovering the unrecoverable. Kroll Ontrack's engineers never turn their back on a challenge, and took on a CD recovery with spectacular results.

As can be seen from the picture, the CD in question was severely damaged; probably after being dropped in a toaster or accidentally falling in a George Foreman grill! Regardless of the reason, our engineers grabbed the bull by the horns and took the job on.

After much cleaning and spinning on the decks, our clever cloggs managed to recover 47% of the data area....nice one!

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Groundbreaking Shuffle Recovery

It is true that here at Kroll Ontrack we’ve seen almost every possible recovery going. So when something new comes along, especially when it involves soldering and microchips, there will be one engineer who will race us all to pick up the challenge....

Most people would wonder why a customer thinks that their music is so valuable that it warrants the diagnosis fee alone, let alone paying for a full recovery. However, it is not our place to ask why, we simply get on with the job in hand. With this in mind, the engineer picked up this job and in so doing, performed the first iPod Shuffle recovery in the history of Kroll Ontrack.

Now, we obviously can’t go in to great depth as to how this pioneering recovery was performed, but we can tell you that it involved the customer’s chips, a set of parts, and plenty of experimentation.
This recovery was much more complicated than normal for two main reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, this kind of recovery had never been performed before so there were no points of reference. Secondly, the small size of the device made any soldering etc, all the more difficult.
Despite these problems, Kroll Ontrack managed to recover 100% of the customer’s data!

Clearly this recovery has further reaching implications; it opens the doors to Kroll Ontrack’s ability to recover data from other manufacturer’s MP3 players and other digital hardware of similar construction.

This is the way forward!