GBTV #603 | Data Recovery…I’m losing my hard drive!
Posted on: July 28, 2009
Posted in: Video
Posted by: Cali Lewis
Shownotes:
I met Mark Taylor from TAYLORMARK (it’s an Oprah/HARPO thing!) a couple years ago when I had a hard drive failure. He watches The Brief and invited us over to his office to see if he could recover it. He recovered that one, and then a little later, I had another failure and he recovered that one. This is now my third drive to bring to him. I like him because I’m cheap and he charges between $499-$799 for most recoveries. That’s about half of what other places charge.
I wanted to share Mark with the Geek Brief audience as a resource. He’s developing a new data recovery store concept that’s designed to calm the nerves of anybody who comes in scared to death that they’ve lost their precious photos or business data. When you walk into the door it feels more like a spa than anything technical. All the technical magic happens in the back, and customers never see it.
The Geek Brief audience has lots of hard core geeks that can recover their own data, but we also have a lot of people who are just casually interested in technology and the gadgets we talk about, and this Brief is for them!
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July 28th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Can’t you just use spinrite?
July 29th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Mark Taylor is clearly a hero and should awarded for his services to humanity but why oh why would geek brief need him? surely you back up?
i use time machine on the mac to back to a drobo and then i use http://www.mozy.com for off site back up. but who knows maybe one day i might need his help
any no of software for windows that dose a similar thing to time machine on the mac?
July 29th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Hi guys, I notice you’ve been using a lot of Depth of Field in this episode and others lately.
How are you doing that with a video camera?
Aloha!
July 29th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Spinrite is the first thing I thought about too. Surely Steve would provide a copy to a fellow podcaster? ;-)
Notice Mark never mentions the price after Cali asks about it — data recovery is VERY expensive but if you have critical data and you aren’t responsible enough to back it up, I guess no price is too high to pay.
And was he reading off cue cards or something? He kept looking to his left as Cali was interviewing him.
Lastly, the idea of installing what basically amounts to a remote access interface at a third party repair center is genius. I wish Mark much success in his endeavor.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Is this episode shot with the EOS? It looks sooo good.
July 29th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I think the video looks horible, all washed out looking. And for the love of god, that man’s head does not need to fill the entire field of view.
And the depth of field, as noticed by the commenter above, seriously, stop.
External drives are the devil. If you’re using them to keep your data safe, you’re doing it wrong. They should not be used as long term storage, just for transport. Heat = death for hard drives and with the external enclosures, there’s no place for the heat generated to go. “But it has a little fan” you might say… Yeah. No.
July 29th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I was thinking about recommending spinrite from http://www.grc.com, but then I was thinking that Miss Cali is an all Mac household. Spinrite does not work on the Mac yet. But I heard that Steve may be working on that.
July 29th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
This is the episode that made me remove geekbrief from my Miro feeds. The content has been going down hill month by month and now the reliability of daily episodes is not even there. Its so disappointing to wait and wait for the episode and get such poor content.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
…on the other hand, I forwarded this episode to a friend who doesn’t watch the Brief because he was recently shopping for data recovery services and I thought he’d find it interesting. I know I did.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Funny how the topic of data recovery always brings out the “experts”. Spinrite? really?… From what I’ve seen Spinrite presumes the drive has a mountable filesystem and is only suffering from bad blocks.. even with that circumstance why would you ever presume the drive will survive “repair” and waste what limited time may be left with the drive operational. Data recovery is best done presuming nothing. If the drive comes ready- meaning it has passed the very minimal internal systems check and can be interfaced through its bus- your best recommended course is to image the device. Not disparaging Spinrite, I am sure it has its place for some, but if the issue is data recovery, a forensic approach with forensic tools is what an expert should recommend.
On the issues of the quality of the video… If you know Cali and Neal, they have no fear in experimenting with new technology. They shot this episode with a DSLR. Give them a little credit for working on the bleeding edge… This episode was literally shot IN ONE TAKE. I was only aware that they were coming by when they were on their way.
As far as the comment regarding cue cards… The camera is on a tripod. Neal is standing behind Cali out of frame. I am not an interview expert (actually this was my first live interview), my focus was shifting between Cali and Neal and the intern standing off camera.. There were no cue cards.
As to the price… That was discussed at a later point and didn’t make the edit. For those who wish to know more about our service and pricing, please visit http://www.taylormark.com/recovery/qa/
Thanks Cali and Neal for the exposure to your audience.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Oh yeah.. One more thing..you can follow TAYLORMARK on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/taylormark or Mark Taylor at http://www.twitter.com/marktayl0r
July 30th, 2009 at 11:04 am
@ih8seag8
The shallow depth of field is caused by having to use a large aperture in order to let enough light in to expose the scene properly. It’s either that or crank up the ISO and deal with increased image noise. In some videos, the shallow DOF “cinematic” look is desirable but in an interview I agree, it detracts from the presentation. I think that an HD camcorder would be much better for this type of video.
@James
Yes every once in a while Cali does something different than the regular daily briefs. This was basically an ad for Taylormark as well as a brief overview of what data recovery is and how it works. If you don’t like an episode, don’t watch it. How about you try to produce a DAILY podcast about tech and see how well you can fill the time. I think Cali and Neal do a great job and the odd “miss” here and there doesn’t bother me in the least.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
This episode was disappointing.
July 31st, 2009 at 7:50 am
The DOF is nothing to apologize for. Yeah, in this ep it was a bit out of place but it adds to the one shots of Cali when she’s off set.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:59 am
Pretty interesting. I like how TaylorMark images the drive first. That way they can duplicate that image and try lots of different recovery techniques to recover as much data as possible without stressing the drive more. I’ve recovered drives using software before and it was pretty much a one shot deal. I also like how TaylorMark does not go all CSI on your drive. That is sure to keep costs reasonable.
July 31st, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I agree with John P. Data recovery is often somewhat of a mystery. Some excellent information in this brief; my students all wanted to watch it twice.
For all of you who are whining about the the details of the presentation of this content that you receive for FREE, perhaps you should consider a significant financial contribution to geekbrief, so they can hire more technical assistants. I, for one, love what Cali and Neal deliver on a regular basis.
February 6th, 2010 at 12:24 am
Hi guys,
Guess I’m a bit late catching this cast. Better now than never I guess.
Data recovery is a fickle beast. I run a small firm in Canada offering economical recoveries. We find we can solve about 60% of recovery issues under $500. Most recoveries by percentage either lie in logical errors or in physical errors that can be bypassed by replacing PCB boards or bypassing performance circuitry.
Spinrite has it’s place but frankly it’s more a data protection utility or file system repair utility than a data recovery program. We use a host of utilities to reconstruct data once we’ve bypassed any hardware issues but ultimately there is no one stop answer. If there was there would be one popular data recovery site not 100,000.
If you’re serious about getting a recovery done, seek the help of a pro. If your time is worth more to you than your money, seek the help of a pro.
If you can’t afford $500+ and really want your files back, try a good D-I-Y site like http://www.aitsavemyfiles.com/datarecoverybasics.php
They will give you plenty of free advice and cheap solutions that may get your data back, but be warned, as stated above, your drive is failing, you will do additional damage trying. Don’t try D-I-Y unless you can afford the loss.
Chris