Whose Data is This?

A customer sent in a crashed hard disk to a computer vendor for recovery. He was however being told that the data was unrecoverable. Urgently in need of the data, the customer then retrieved the disk from the vendor and sent to ADRC .

We finally rescued all data from the damaged disk. We told the good news to the customer who then rushed to our office to review the data. However, upon further checking, the customer realized that all the data in fact belonged to some one else ! The vendor had returned the wrong disk to the customer probably due to poor logistic control. The original damaged disk was however no longer retrievable.

The furious customer just could not do anything. Besides lost of his valuable data, there was also data confidentiality issue as his data could still be recoverable from the damaged disk which was now lost somewhere.

In some similar but not so disastrous events, we found the disk came back with incompatible, non-original or missing parts. In some cases, it could certainly affect the costs and chance of successful recovery. It was bad enough to have a disk crash, more so if some one tampered the spoiled media and cause further damage