 Come to another episode of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Likeable science is about why science matters to us all, why it's a vital and dynamic part of everyone's life, everyone's daily life. And we've got a great show today where we're really going to get into some of the people understand. I have Tyler Rouse here with me. Welcome, Tyler. Thank you. Tyler is the owner and data recovery engineer for Hawaii Recovery, LLC, and it's a company that does data recovery, right? Absolutely. It implies. And this is when your computer goes bad and suddenly you can't get the data you need, be there your old pictures, your old term papers, your current bank statements, whatever it may be, right? Right. Pretty much your entire digital life on that computer is on that hard drive. Yeah. And when computers, when hard drives go bad or you can't access things and you can't just reboot it and start it up and get it back, what do you do? Right. Yeah. So at the recovery level what we do is when individuals have that failed hard drive or that storage media, they're able to send it out to us. We do have a full service clean room, so we're able to open the drives, we're able to switch out critical components in order to get that drive back up and running again, recover the data and then send it back to the client. Cool. That's critical stuff. And yet people don't think about it a lot. Everyone these days thinks, hey, I'm hooked up, I got my data up in the cloud. It's safe, right? Right. Right. Fortunately, over 80% of America actually doesn't back up at all, which is an astounding number. Yeah. In fact, the larger percentage of that is actually corporations or businesses that are backing up their data, which means that at a home like a residence, almost all of America, very large percentage of America doesn't have any backups at all, despite the importance of the data that they have on that computer. Yeah. Yeah. Because a lot of people put on the computer is very valuable stuff. These days, all your pictures live there, right? Absolutely. Watch your phone this fall, of course. Right. Absolutely. And it's very critical because these are all moments of your life, right? Everything that's on your hard drive that you placed on there equates to time, right? If it's a picture or a video, it equates to a memory that you can never go back to. Right? Irreplaceable. Absolutely irreplaceable. It's documentation for legal purposes, for jobs, for whatever you may have, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. It used to be, you kept this all on paper and it was filed away neatly somewhere, supposedly. Right. And then, of course, if your house burned, you lost it, but, huh? Right. Yeah, definitely. Some of those issues still exist. For instance, backups at home, there are still issues that can occur with it, but hopefully with today, with our line of discussion, we're able to educate the viewers about backups, data recovery, and how to save your data and eliminate needing to go to a company like ours. So you mentioned earlier, your company, you get things, you mentioned the clean room. Now, clean room is a facility, basically, that has sort of sealed off, has super well ventilated but extremely highly filtered air, so basically, the clean rooms, at least, that I used to work in, University of Washington, said they had one-tenth of the contaminant levels of hospital operating rooms. Right. Every clean room and clean bench, based on the filter type that's used, every filter is going to have an ISO class. The ISO determines the sanitation of the air that's entering that environment. And you're absolutely right. The clean room is exactly intended to eliminate as much dust and debris in the air as possible, so that way doesn't end up inside the drives that we're working on. Right. Because these drives, if they get dust on that spec of dust that looks invisible to us, is a big chunk of grip on this drive, right? Absolutely. And it's an interesting concept. Something that contains all of our data that is irreplaceable is on something so incredibly fragile. Just like you were saying, a spec of dust, inside the drive, if the heads go over that spec of dust, it can irreplaceably damage the platter or damage that head and entirely render it irrecoverable. So a clean room, and especially having a good clean room, is critically important to our work and data recovery. That's great. So then let's talk a little bit about how does good data go bad? Got you. What can happen to data? What are the sort of failure modes, right? So there's three different areas of failure. There's physical failure, there's firmware failure, and software failure. Physical failure is where a physical component on the actual drive itself were to fail, which contributes to not functioning properly. A firmware failure is where the storage media itself has an issue identifying itself or an issue communicating with the computer. And a software failure is that interaction between the computer and the storage media itself, where it actually fails at that level. Let's dissect those a little for just a second. So that first mode of physical failure, so your disk and your computer stop spinning. So now what we're looking at right here is these two right here are your most common hard drive types. These are called hard disk drives. And what this is is here, this is a hard disk, right? This is a polycarbonate platter that has been coated with a metallic filament, which allows it to store data. Now this section here is called the head stack. Now right here in the very tip, there's little tiny heads. They're about the size of actually the tip of this pen. And those will actually travel just over the top of the platter. And it will read the data from that. Not quite touching the platter, right? Correct. But just barely off it, but very, very, very close, which is why a speck of dust can be so problematic, all right? Absolutely. In fact, it's actually about a sixth of the width of a human hair. OK. Right. So it's incredibly tiny. Now down here, we have what's called a magnetic servo. What this does is that this uses a induction coil, which is copper, in order to push power through it and move the heads back and forth on the platter. So using this pivot point here, as power is applied, it'll end up being moved to the left and the right. So that way, the heads can traverse the platter and be able to read the data. So this is the most common two types of drives that are in computers now. And these are the most susceptible, as hard disk drives, to being susceptible to hardware failure, right? So now they're not limited just to disk drives, even solid state drives. M2s, M-satas, all these new cutting-edge storage medias that we're using today and all of our new modern computers can also still have physical failures as well. So the next, you went into what you called firmware failures. Now that's... So firmware, so let's say, for instance, again, using these two drives here. So this drive is a Western Digital. Western Digital uses dozens and dozens of firmware modules and service area modules, which work together to essentially tell the hard drive how to communicate properly with the computer, how to read the data properly, how to translate it so that computer can understand it. And then that way, the computer knows what to do with it. So that's the firmware level there. Each one of these modules has a different purpose to keep the drive operational and functioning. Now on the software side... That's more coding almost. Right, yeah, so that's the interaction of the hard drive itself to the actual computer. So that's from what the firmware does once it ends that point, which stops at the front of the drive. Everything beyond that, as far as communicating with the computers on that software level. Now the software is actually stored on the drive. It's not stored on the computer. And within that, if there's a failure there, then, again, the hard drive will fail to recognize on the computer. So what do you do when somebody brings in a drive and says, it don't work? Well, there's always a series of questions that we ask them. One of the most important questions is do you open the drive? There's a lot of clients that we have that they'll go online. They'll Google, no research, and they'll say, hey, based on what you're talking about, it sounds like stuck heads. So what stuck heads is is where the heads actually get stuck on the platters themselves. Now this one is an enterprise drive. So the heads are actually parked in the center of the platter. Now on this one over here, and let me move this over, you'll see that little tiny orange piece. Now that small orange piece, which is located here, is where the heads would sit on a typical drive. So now with that being said, that failure is going to occur at any point in time from that. But then you have to step by step break it down and go through and see what part is working, what part isn't working. Right. I'm sorry, I prematurely closed my statement. So from this, if the drive's already been opened, we know that we should expect dust and particulates and fat the drive. So we need to go through an actual clean room process. No thing we're going to be looking at is actually right here on the platters. If you have what's called a collapsed head, that means that the head itself has become damaged. It's collapsed and torn off from the head stack. And again, the head stack is this little part right here. Now from that head stack, if it does tear away, if the platters continue to spin, it can dig into the platters like a chisel. That type of image is entirely irrecoverable from it. So unfortunately, that's that catch-all. If that damage exists, there's nothing that anybody can do about that. Otherwise, typically what ends up happening is that if the heads are stuck on the platter, we would end up using a special tool called a head unstick kit. And that would actually move the heads off of the platters and onto this orange piece that was on this drive right over here. Now the head stack replacement would be the next step. If the heads are damaged because they touched the platter, we would actually replace the entire head stack. So we would replace this component. So that way, everything inside that drive can read the platters properly. And if that doesn't work, then now we go into a much more advanced session of data recovery where we start actually taking the platters out of this drive and start moving it into other drives. So we can preserve as much hardware as possible. So you actually have separate drives. You can actually pull the disks out and set them this drive in and read it in your own heads, basically, if it isn't too badly damaged. Correct. So when any part inside of a hard drive is damaged, whether it's the head stack, whether it's the magnetic servo, if it's the printed circuit board, which is located on the back of a drive. So whatever the type of damage is, every part would come from what's called a donor drive. And donor drives are pretty expensive, but that's where we would end up getting those parts from. Unfortunately, there's no repairing parts. You can only replace them. So yeah. OK, that's good. And it does seem like we're in an era of there's more and more the phrase of big data now is all around. Everything's big data, all of this genomic data now, all of your phone works. Siri can direct you through directions through big data sets, basically. So there's more and more data around. It seems only reason to expect that we're going to see more and more data failures, right? Well, yes. I mean, data storage mediums are becoming more and more reliable as we go along. My prime example is that this disk drive here has been around for the birth of computers. The only thing that's changed is the connector type. So here we see a SATA connector, which is serial over ATA. What used to be around is a 48-pin IDE connector, the old gray ribbon cables. They used to be the old computers. However, we've moved away primarily from disk drives. Now, there's still being manufactured. There's still a reliable piece of equipment. However, we want to move away from that. And we want to move into something that's more reliable that can protect our data even more. So this here is a prime example of what we're moving towards. This is what's called an M-SATA solid-state drive. And what this does is that this has absolutely no moving components. And it's a solid chip similar to your processor, similar to your RAM or your motherboard within your computer. However, these are still susceptible to hardware failures and software and firmware failures as well. And we're going to talk more about those failures and how they happen and what you do about them. When we come back right now, we're going to take a little bit of a break here. I'm Ethan Allen, your host of Think Tech Hawaii here, likeable science. Tyler Rose from Data Recovery is with me. And we're talking about data recovery. We'll be back in one minute. Aloha. I am Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Cold Green for Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at 3. And I have really, really exciting guests on the exciting topic of energy efficiency. Hope to see you there. Aloha. I'm Jay Fiedel, one of the hosts of Asia in Review, which is broadcast Monday afternoons on thinktechawai.com. We cover, we study news and politics in and affecting Asia. We work hard to bring you the most interesting subjects and guests who will raise your awareness. Please join us Mondays every week on Asia in Review on thinktechawai.com and also on YouTube and iTunes. Thanks for watching. We'll see you then. Aloha, Shae Shae, and Sai Jian. And you're back here on Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Tyler Rose from Data Recovery LLC is with me. Hawaii Recovery, sorry, is with me today. We're talking about data recovery on computers. And we were talking about the storage media of various types and the changes that are going on. And all the things that can and inevitably will go wrong with them, right? You were telling me actually before the show that your backup drive after four or five years really is starting to fail itself almost inevitably sort of on a statistical basis. It's beginning right. Well, just like with anything mechanical, mechanical parts are designed to wear out over time. And it stands true to your hard drive the same as your car. So when that happens, then you can't get it. And somebody comes to you and says, fix this for me. And you say, that will be right. So for us, we're a little different than your mainland data recovery labs. For us, we're flat rate regardless of complexity or data recovery size. But it's still pretty expensive. For a regular consumer, it costs them $500 to get a data recovery through our shop. Now, granted, it's a flat rate. So it doesn't increase or like that, no surprises. Typically, what most clients see across the nation is between $802,000 for a single drive recovery. Money that, at least I don't have to, around sitting here, that I can spend on one item. I got a lot better things to do with that. Yeah, exactly. So unfortunately, there's a lot of clients that end up turning around and they say, I can't afford this or I can't justify it. So therefore, they lost the pictures of their kids growing up or they lost the work that they spent the last three years generating. So in that case, it's very unfortunate that we have clients that forego the recovery of their data because it's obviously very important to them. So the next thing that we do is we try to educate them on backups and how we can prevent them from coming to our shop again in the future. And this is what I was joking about earlier. Everyone these days thinks, oh, well, the cloud exists and my stuff's on Google Drive. Therefore, it's all safe and protected and I don't have to worry about this anymore. Unfortunately, so that's true. It's great that we have alternatives such as the cloud. It's fantastic because the redundancy of hard drives, the redundancy of your data to prevent data losses done for you. However, there's still limitations to the cloud. A prime example for the cloud is that you can't really run an operating system on it. You can kind of, but for your regular consumer, the operating system will always be on your local hard drive. If you did not set up your backup solution, your backup solution is not working for you. And that's one of the big misconceptions a lot of individuals have because they talk about, hey, I have Dropbox, I have Google Drive, I have Azure, I have AWS. And so although that's fantastic, if they didn't actually set it up and start setting up a backup plan, it's not backing up any of your data. And unfortunately, we do see that a lot where clients believe it's on the cloud until they come in and we try to assist them in retrieving it from the cloud and then we determine that it doesn't exist there. Right, or they're missing parts, critical parts of it. Right, exactly. And backing up really isn't that hard, right? I mean, it's not, again, it's one of these sort of things which if you make it a part of your life and just it's a normal part of your, for how your life goes about your daily, it doesn't have to be daily, I'm sure, but so tell us a little bit about what it takes really to do backup the way it should be done. Backing up nowadays is really easy, super easy. Now, for all these software designers that are making these backup programs, they want to make it consumer-friendly, they want to make it really easy. And there's programs out there where it's one button, you click one button and it starts backing up everything. And there's programs out there that are much more complex to give you variable options and et cetera. But so a lot of these programs can be user-friendly, so even for those that aren't really computer savvy, they're still able to back up their data with minimal effort without really outside help. Now, as far as for the actual cost of backing up, now, like I said, a few minutes ago, our cost for data recovery for each client is $500. However, if they had purchased a backup plan in the past, they may have only spent $50 or $60. And that $60 investment can last in the rest of their life into that backup program since they own that license now. So it's kind of like insurance. You never need insurance until you need it, right? So backups is the same thing. OK. So I mean, is your group actually, you actually run backup services for people? Or OK. So if we do have clients that they don't understand backups, they don't understand how backups work, how to install the software, how to check their backups, we provide the support for them. A lot of the time, if it's simply just TeamViewer over or remote desktop over the internet, there's a very small fee. It's $25 just to check your backups, set you up with your preferred backup program, et cetera. So that way, we can ensure that you're set up properly and that you're not going to run into that issue later. So on some regular basis, then our computer is chat with your computer, your computer is stash all their data. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And another thing to point out too about a lot of these backup programs is automation. Once it's set up and once you get that first backup done, as long as that hard drive is connected to the computer whenever a backup starts, it generally works pretty well. So you can set it up on Monday. And 10 years down the road, you spent probably a collective of two hours over 10 years just checking the backups to make sure that it shows a green light. Yeah, and it's much cheaper than spending the $2,000 on. Absolutely. Just because you at one point did something stupid. Absolutely. And one huge point to toss out there is data recovery is a evolving practicing science. As new drives come out, as Western Digital or SeaGator, as they come out with new hard drives and new storage mediums, it's a cat and mouse game where data recovery now is constantly catching up. With that being said, because it's a practicing science, there's no guarantee that you can get your data back. So even for those that say, well, if my hard drive were to fail, it's not a big deal. I'll send it off to a data recovery lab. But again, if you look at the hard drive again, if that damage were to be on the platters, then unfortunately, there is no recovering that data. And that fallback of data recovery, and again, this is the platter here, so that fallback of having a data recovery company is ineffective now. Yeah, I mean, people I think have run into that already when you used to have your data all on your 3.5 inch floppy. And now nobody has any drives that'll work for 3.5 inch floppy anymore, anyhow. So even if the data is still sitting there, it still happens to be good. Who can actually access that data? Absolutely. I assume you guys probably could, but we would try, certainly. But really, the big thing you got to ask yourself is, on your computer, what can you afford to lose? And if you say, you know, I could have my computer fail today, and I'm not worried about anything, well, maybe you don't need to back up. Maybe you don't need a computer. Maybe you don't need a computer. But if you take a look at all the different data types, I mean, we have pictures from vacations. How many times have you gotten on the phone with somebody and they're sort of pausing and say, sorry, my computer is being slow today, right? Right, yeah. We're just trying to do the normal business. And their computer is determining the speed at which they can do it. And if their computer fails, you know, they're not going to be able to do anything for you. Absolutely. I was on a United Airlines plane at one point, second in line for takeoff. And they announced that the central computers at United had failed. And they couldn't make one last calculation that they needed. And therefore, that plane was not going to move until they got the computers back up and running, because it's just definitely a good thing. You don't want to be in the air without support. Absolutely. No complaints. But they are important. They determine our lives. So yeah, having good backups, having access, knowing that things are back up, should allow you to sleep better, right? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And this is like a prime example. For those that say, that wouldn't happen to me, right? We like to think that nothing bad would ever happen to any of us. But a prime example is we had a client about six weeks ago. She came in with her significant other. And we took it into the cleaning room. We opened it up. And we saw that there was platter damage. We plugged it into our computer, right? And we attempted to isolate if there was a chance of recovery. And unfortunately, there wasn't. Now, for her, the important data on there was her entire degree. She used the same drive for her entire degree. And all of her homework was on there. And obviously, she was very upset. And it's a little bit late for us at that point to try to educate her on backups. But she appreciated the education. And she really wanted to turn around and really start backing up her data now. And unfortunately, it took a bad situation. It's a blessing for her. Yeah, exactly. I mean, she was tuition, but she paid more tuition there. Well, yeah, yeah. Of course, we didn't charge her. If we don't recover the data, there's no charge. But backing up data is that important no matter what you have on there, really. Right, right. No, it's critical. And it's only going to get more critical as time goes on. More and more and more of our lives are now essentially boiled down to data that is being stored somewhere. Right. And really, another thing to point out, too, is inside mechanical drives, you have what's called sector failures. So let's say, for instance, that this one here would have 1 billion, 900 million sectors. So out of that, for files, files are all made up of sectors. So if you have bad sectors, sectors can't be repaired. So if you have bad sectors, that file, even though you recovered the whole file, that file may not open or may not be available anymore. Backing up would have prevented that again. OK, OK. Yeah, so there are lots of different ways and things can go wrong, lots of different problems that can happen. And so I guess what I'm hearing from you, a take-home message, is that you should think carefully about your backup. Perhaps talk to somebody like yourself about what you need in the way of backup, how free you should back up, what you should back up, how, when, where. And figure out a good solution that matches your sophistication, your time, your energy, your level of investment, and the value of your data, of course. Absolutely. And with backups, with current technology and backups, data preservation has become more and more prominent in new methods on how it's being delivered. A prime example would be a system backup. If you were to take a backup of your entire system, there's plenty of companies out there that offer that type of backup service. If you were to create a backup of your entire system, and tomorrow you get a virus, you just restart the computer, tell it to restore from the most recent backup, and then you're done. Virus is gone. Everything's right back to where it was when you backed up. So backups is more now usable in everyday life rather than just the preservation of a file. Right. And the threat of cyber attacks on all seems to be not diminishing, let us say. Ransomware is a huge one of those as well. Yeah. So that's it. Well, this is incredibly valuable stuff that you're telling us, and great to know about, and a wonderful preventative medicine, as it were. So before we close it, I'm going to take a step to the side to ask a completely off the wall question. Has nothing to do with data recovery at all? All right. So if you had a choice of a superpower that you could either fly or be invisible, which would you choose and why? Well, in society, we're all invisible after the third degree of separation, so I'd probably say fly. I explore the world, see different cultures. OK, good. Well, all right. Anyhow, so Tyler Rouse, a data recovery engineer from Hawaii Recovery, has been telling us today all about why we should back up data. It's probably the big take home, right? Absolutely. Back up your data. Absolutely. Do not come visit us. If you can prevent visiting us, by all means, you should. Yeah, it's cheaper. It's better. It's quicker. It's going to save you time, save you money, save you energy. If anybody has any questions about backups, by all means, reach out to our company. We're not money hungry. If you were to call us and ask us my questions, we're not going to tell you to come to the shop. If we can answer it over the phone, we'll be happy to help you. There we go. So I hope you'll come back to see us, Likeable Science, next week on Hero and Think Tech Hawaii. Until then.