 So I'm not making videos in the studio Sometimes I have to work on a few other things now my staff does this and so do I and I Get involved more in some of the more technical parts because I'm a Linux guy and we use Linux to do data recovery stuff and Let's talk about data recovery the process and like this computer here It's a little bit full of smoke that burned up because people like to smoke at their desks a lot Let me show you what's in the shop right now for data recovery and then we're gonna talk about data recovery and process so Got all the customer stuff flipped over But this is here because we're putting the hard drive from their computer into this one because they had no backups That one's actually not data recovery This one's data recovery They computer died get files off computer and this is a whole bunch of data recovery going on for a Person will say they work in a creative space and they have all their content and they didn't back it up properly And so I want to rant and talk about that a little bit So we do a lot of data recovery work here It's a mainstay for what comes into the retail side of the store but it's a crossover between retail people and a lot of small businesses I'm gonna say but there's a handful of big ones that we have they have no backups either and we run into this all the time and So I want to cover some of the processes We use how we handle that and some of the strategies behind it and a little bit about the software use I'm not gonna go in-depth in too much detail on the software I'm gonna say that for another video I've been trying to put it together because it's kind of I'm not gonna use the word have hazard, but there's just like a lot of things we try it There's not always a oh we just use this tool and it works There's a lot of people that kind of buy into that like oh, yeah, you just buy the software and it recovers your data No, and we'll actually talk about this particular job because it had its own unique challenges in doing this so To get started first. I joke around say nobody backs up I'm gonna say nobody is probably a bit extreme, but I will tell you there's a lot of people that don't back up and What is especially in a small business market? It's a big challenge because I'm not sure how to convince them they they start doing this and this person I said we're gonna create space it's why there's all these two terabyte hard drives right here and they produce some of their content on a Mac and some on Windows, so they put these labels on the drives and Because they were smoking at their desk They filled the computer up overheated it and didn't realize it was overheated So they started the reload process of Windows and thought they were saving the files and the files got corrupted and this is the more common way That we end up with a data recovery problem So they didn't realize that these weren't working so these just don't work at all these external drives There's whatever's wrong with them. They make clicking noises and have bad drives. Sometimes we're able to pull them out of like this one They only break the external part, so we're able to get the hard drive out Of the box that it was in because once you open up a lot of these it's just a normal hard drive inside Or it's not occasion. It's a new problem. We were running into instead of having a normal hard drive They have a drive with the board mounted on there What happens is people crack the little pieces on the end here and it causes this to quit So we can just take them apart and sometimes we get the data from them They got lucky on that one. The other ones are dead. They have to go out for data recovery Now the software problems you run into are corrupt files more than anything else corrupt files Or just the computer quit turning on and they have no backups of any of the data on there It is crazy to me because this goes for even some of the larger clients that we have that are not under any Type of plan with us or on a what we call break fix and what that means is they call us when they need us That's fine And we make sure in writing. This is a business tip here. I email them Please note. You probably should check your backups. So I've Reiterated in a very polite way. I suggest one on there I see no one was the last time you checked your backups When I say that I mean did you do a restore? You don't just see some green icon next to the software that you think is backing up Have you tested and done a restore? We actually suggest they do this at least once every 30 days Even if they want to manage the backup themselves It just grab a random file. Can you restore it great now? You can sleep better at night and it should be a big concern But we have some clients and one of them has a staff of around 30 that we know isn't backing up We tell them we finally proved they weren't backing up because they wanted me to look for something I said it's not and he said what was last backup? I said about two years ago I said all the files on your backup drive are about two years old and they're like well That's not good and I looked at it and the software is corrupted that has the backup It's the servers like 11 or 12 years old and it needs to be reinstalled the backup program It's one open no more and they don't know where the diss are They don't know who set it up if some guy ten years ago and they've just been Leaving these external drives just plugged in and I'm like it's not copying files anymore So I gave him a proposal to fix it and they're still thinking about it And I kind of blows my mind, you know and that's where I get almost jaded like I know they're going to call me with the problem and sometimes these people who've called us We've had repeat offenders as they call them especially people who work in a creative space They are some of the worst are very artistic and they create a lot of content photographers videographers And they don't seem to back anything up and that's what leads to they buy all these drives They go it's a lot of data for me to back up and of course that increases the backup prices But the other side of it is you are being paid to do a job you really need to back all this stuff up And so that is the kind of struggle so when things come in first we talk to them about it now the immediate argument we get from a lot of people is I will only pay you if you can recover everything And I'm sorry that's the the argument we always have against that is if you can't define what everything is There's simply that's an unachievable task There's a lot of time and effort that goes in these backups and figuring out where all the files are and recovering them And sometimes I just simply ask okay, can you have do you have a manifest everything on the drive and I have yet to have anyone Say yes, they never do they go. I don't know. I have a bunch of this and I know I recorded a thing How many videos were in the thing you recorded? I don't remember Well, usually the thing people who are having no backups are also no documentation for what they're actually missing Sometimes we get lucky and they're just missing like they go. I lost my quickbooks file and we can try and recover it Now the way when we bring in a system here and you see this big Spread out because we had to take everything apart. There's some tricks to doing this to keep yourself organized This is critical to running things in a very organized manner is making sure that we label all the things I'm gonna show you here and we use a really simple method for this get ready for it pricing gun We got a little sticker on here that does a custom ID So these are customer IDs that we put on here and we put lots of them on here We put customer IDs on everything that comes out of here for each project Everything but the screws but all the little pieces that come off everything We just stick stick stick stick and put the customer ID in this also helps with the file copy process So our recovery machine over here, which I'll jump over to in a second When you're at the recovery machine All the data that's copied we've heard to has a blind copy. We don't copy it to the customer's name So it's not your name when it comes in you're assigned a customer ID and this helps with The fact that people have common names we we have over About 6,500 people Plus or minus in our system right now And if I did a names analysis, I can guarantee there's a lot of common last names And first names and so you don't want to name files on that because I mean worst-case scenario Like we thought you were the bobbosmith that had this one, but there's a bobbosmith over here Common name problems So we make sure we do everything by id keeps everything very anonymous plus almost all copying we do as you'll see We're doing via linux command line. We don't sort through people's files. We don't want to sort through people's files There's always that concern like are you going to look through all my stuff? No, I don't want to I don't whatever's in there is your personal business unless there is some reason you ask us to go looking for a specific thing We generally just find the data understand the file types and start organizing them Now some of the other recovery process is What happens when people break things in a weird way? Well, that's where the software comes in so hard drives do fail And they do start clicking and they have to go out to data recovery But most all the time people accidentally drag things somewhere Reload windows on top of windows and destroy data Or dude did an update and turned it off during the middle of an update and just corrupted all the files on a hard drive That is the majority of the recovery work and a majority of the computers come in here that people think they lost everything That's how we're able to save them on a very High rate time is this it's a file corruption problem as long as the drive physically spins and works You're good. We can generally recover it with whatever utilities So let's go over to the recovery machine and talk a little bit more about the process So this is our recovery station that we use for data recovery. We've got a Card recovery we do here most all the time it's hard drive recovery And we call the machine wood which is just an all-in-one that we mounted to a wood frame And it's right here now the tools we use is our studio to scan the drive and we're running all this in Linux Now this drive is mounted to our nasa ray in the back and what that allows us to do is based on the customer ID number so we have a customer ID number tagged on a hard drive so we know whose hard drive this is and This little script down here is basically we're just using rsync nothing special So once we figure out Where's the data on the drive? How do we get the data over and we copy it to their customer number and then recover it Now one of the things that we do and I've heard some people do this Like they create a complete image of every drive before they start the recovery process There's times when you do that most of the time what we're doing is where are the files and it turns out And this is the mount path for it. It's uh Media recovery owest found 005 There's actually a whole lot of found folders on here because to give you an idea what happened was when they did the reload over the top Which a lot of people do that they go. Oh, it won't damage my files window Don't trust windows to not damage your files and reload Always have a backup what it did was it dropped it created all these found folders that it found and dropped all their data in there So once we realize actually all the documents photos and everything they were looking for from their quick book their uh Excel sheets and everything was all in found 005. There's actually about 30 found folders So it just kind of becomes a forensics look and we went through the system and just Basically looked and said, okay, how much data is in each folder now? You can do this in linux with the df command. So it's like we look through the files and we just basically I'm sorry. I said df, but it's du dash ssh and by doing that We were able to look through each of the folders and find the folders that were big and said, huh Really interesting there happens to be gigs worth of data in this one found 005 folder The other ones hardly had anything in there So simply by looking at that on the system That was the indicator that that might be where something is and as soon as you went in there They all have the file names under there that was probably things under my document So there was a whole series of named folders that were the named folders for the projects They specifically said they had lost on all these drives that are piled around here, you know from these Broken drives. So we take the drive out pop it in here found all of them Well, this actually this particular hard drive was the one was the os one We have the other hard drive is somewhere in the other pile now. We're trying to that's another recovery process once again corrupted drive And we don't know how they got corrupted But that's so much the day recovery is just that now when we're all done we're going to suggest again that this person back up but I have a feeling because This is a newer client, but we've had a couple clients in this creative space that are Been here more than I think with the record. I think we have one of them three times They've come here and spent a lot of money on data recovery because they put everything in one place That one place fails and or falls off the desk twice fell off the desk And that's it all the data was on it all the data is gone And I can't emphasize enough how critical it is to encourage everyone to back up But that's also the the part that just has my head spinning all the time that I've done everything I can't do encourage him and I always feel like I when I hear about a failure of a client And we like yeah, we know we weren't backing up, but I still feel bad. It's like we have to deliver the news occasionally Yeah, there's nothing we can get off of here and they start with you know So see if there's a retail client like but all my data is on there or all my kids pictures are on there for the retail people And I'm like, I'm sorry. I I wish I had a better answer We here's the data recovery company And we'll work with them to physically take the drive apart as we don't do that in-house here and get your data, but Occasionally we've even had some of those That even the recovery places couldn't have because some of the hard drives have glass platters in them And we're not sure what the person had done But the glass on the platter shattered So it was just nothing left inside of there for us to do the the drive was completely broken This is an example of one of those drives. Listen The platters broke the glass platter lots of pieces I don't know what circumstance leads to some of these things Uh, they dropped it hard obviously hard enough that it broke it But if you got glass platters in these there's No data recovery company that can solve a broken platter when all the data is in tiny tiny tiny little bits in here I we can use this in maraca though so But that's kind of the data recovery process is putting it in here going through now Well, the rundown of the tools that we use is going to be Our studio which i'm going to do a separate tutorial at some time just on our studio because it's a pretty extensive program For doing data recovery. It's great. It's it's been my go-to tool that i'm really happy with because it has a lot of organization tools Uh in windows recover rec uva is a popular one as well. We don't hardly ever use it But it does work. It's one of the ones out there, but the our studio for linux I like a lot that's a really happy tool the other one is test disk and i'm going to probably combine some of those tools in there Because they each have their purpose and test this is interesting because it basically goes if people lost the file system And lost specifically all the metadata like what the file names are Test this can go through the drive and just find things based on their header information go. Hey, that looks like a photo So i'm gonna throw it in a photo category that looks like a word doc and i'll throw it in a doc category It's a uh terribly disorganizing way to do things and it creates a ton of mess So it's not the best tool to use But our studio like you said i'm gonna do a separate tutorial on just how to use our studio because it does a really good job of Going through finding the files and you can do things like uh search for date ranges search for Wildcard file names that they know they only want certain pictures You're able to do that and then you're able to tell our studio to create a hierarchical structure of all the things It finds and put them in an organized way, which is very helpful Which is unfortunately a problem when everything's in dot 005. Uh, I got to do a little command line kung fu Which I can't really do a great tutorial on because i'm not wonderful at it I'll kind of muddle my way through on uh looking up exactly how to use set an awk to do a search and replace And rename a group of files on here, uh and put them all in one directory. That's uh not really I'm not the best most qualified person to do tutorial on i'm hoping to get my I usually just contact my friend phil Because he's a command line wizard his license plate is said awk He helps me with some of these things maybe I can get him to do a tutorial on how uh, how that actually works It's an advanced scripting, but definitely one of the reasons we use link once he copy all this over We use scripts from the command line to shuffle the files around and organize them in a more meaningful way So those are the primary tools now on occasionally and I'm going to give a shout out to here And I've heard some people really hate it and really like it, but I'll give a shout out to spin right We also have a copy of spin right I gotta admit like I've I've followed us to Gibson for a long time and we bought the license for it We legitimately have the program and it's it's okay. I don't really find Uh, most of the time on the drive is at that level of failure I haven't found the most success with it But my I do understand his point of using it to keep drives healthy because of the way it works and things like that So I find spin right me or review that as well Me I'll just put together a separate video just for that But I want to talk about some of the functional parts here today and dealing with clients on it and making sure that We give them clear understanding of how we're doing because this has come up, you know, quite a few times So our backup process and procedure is this blind copy organizing everything by customer ID number Using our studio or in this case sometimes you just go through and uh use the du command and look at the size of each individual folder and determine. Oh look, I found all the data. So sometimes it's a, uh It's not as straightforward. It isn't like oh, I just look at the drive. You can say it's not there You can start doing some searching and go, huh, there's where all the data somehow ended up. So there's not a single method by which it works to do your data recovery. That's why it's a Uh, learned experience to start even looking inside of different files and things like that But I want to share with you that so some of the projects that kind of distract me from making videos, uh But also make us money. I generally my staff handles all the basic data recovers a lot of times Just copying files off of because heart the computer died and this had to take the hard drive out This one because they tried reloading it turned into a little bit more of a challenge Uh because of where to put the files and we have to get some more advanced utilities going to Get this recovered or in this case find all the files and exclude certain files on with an rsync script Uh to get them all copied to a server. All right Hopefully this was helpful in lightning or maybe uh, you can think about backups And if you're a business watching this you're like, I should back up you really should back up Please back up your data. I can't save it every single time Uh, and if you know someone who isn't backing up just remind them nudge them a little bit and say hey You should be backing up too. All right. Thanks for watching. If you like to content here like and subscribe