What is a Clean Room? Since the inside of a hard drive cannot tolerate the dust and moisture in the air around us, a clean room is necessary when we need to open the drive in order to accomplish a
disk recovery
. In some ways it's like a medical operating room. In reality, it's a cleaner environment in many regards. I'm sure you've seen TV commercials or reports about high-tech manufacturers that include pictures showing people working in these types of environments. They're dressed in head-to-toe full-coverage suits. These suits are not there to protect the worker. They are needed to protect an open hard drive from being contaminated by the worker.
When is a Clean Room Needed? Some failures of hard drives involve internal mechanical or electronic problems. If a drive suffers an internal problem of any nature, it must be opened before we can determine what is required in order to affect a repair and recovery. It takes a high-tech environment with highly trained technicians to locate the problems and make the repairs, and, ultimately, to recover the data from a damaged drive.
It's Expensive, But... Going to the clean room doesn't mean you'll be taken to the cleaners -- not with us. Some labs will flat-rate their work and quote an arbitrary, very high price before they even see the drive. That type of pricing is unfair, in our opinion, since it has nothing to do with the actual amount of work involved. Once we've completed an initial paid clean room evaluation, you'll get a real quote from us, and real information on the likelihood of a successful disk recovery.
Backup software is available
in a variety of forms, both for tape and other methods. If you're not planning to use a tape backup, check out some of the software titles available in computer stores. Any software worth its salt will allow you to schedule automatic backup files at a frequency you select. You can use these software solutions to reduce the data to a single backup file of a size that will fit on some sort of removable media (Zip, Jaz, removable hard drive, Read-Write CD's, etc.) Typically, using the non tape method, you would create a backup file on your hard drive. Once complete, copy the backup file to your removable media.
Laptop Computer Data Saved: A sales rep for a large multi-national firm returned from an extended trip, having dutifully entered all of his call details in a database on his notebook computer. His first day back in the home office revealed that his data collected over the past three weeks was not available. His IS department could not find the data, and issued a new notebook computer to the sales rep, but decided to check around for someone who could retrieve the data. Internet Desk was called and the data recovery process began. Since the information was so time critical, the DataICU worked around the clock and into the weekend to finish the recovery and made the files available via ftp in time for the Monday morning sales meeting.
