Yesterday, I received a call from an end user who described an issue with his laptop drive that failed to fully boot into the OS he had just passed over to his company’s internal IT. While the tech was trying to attempt data recovery, I explained to the customer that while it might be possible that his tech might recover his data, there is a good chance that he is making it worse and may reduce the chances of a successful recovery.
I advised that if his data is important enough to get it done professionally, it is better to get it sent in before the damage is made worse. But, if he is okay with the risk, let the tech go at it.
He immediately went to the tech and told him to stop. The tech explained that after watching some YouTube videos, he was running some third party recovery programs to try and recover his files, unscuccessfully, thus far.
I just received the NVMe SSD freshly formatted yesterday morning by the tech attempting the recovery. The end result, the SSD is full of emtpy (0x00) sectors, thanks to the TRIM process and now it is impossible to recover any data at this point. Rule #1 in data recovery is to never write data to or format the drive from which you are trying to recover data.
As the subject of this post states, a tech with good intentions doesn’t mean good results. Sadly, as I’m sure my peers can confirm, a very high percentage of unrecoverable data recovery cases we get are the result of good intentions gone bad. I’m sure that the technician was doing his best, based on the knowledge he had available to him at the time. My goal is to help educate both end users and technicians so that situations like this can be avoided in the future.
What to do
If you are experiencing data loss or you are a technician trying to deal with a customer’s data loss, reach out to us (Toll Free 866-750-3169) before anything is done and we will glady give you advice on what to do next.
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IT Department Training
Got an IT department that could use some basic training for data recovery? You can also reach out to us and we can work together to come up with a custom data recovery 101 class for your team.