15 Years of Data Recovery
During August 2021 CDR celebrated fifteen years of trading. Based in Greater Manchester, Cheadle DATA Recovery Ltd offers professional data recovery services for hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state disks (SSDs), RAID arrays, virtualised storage, NAS, SAN, and memory sticks/cards.
What’s changed in recent years?
Some changes are well documented; the increased adoption of SSDs, increased HDD capacity and the move to virtualised storage in server environments. Other changes, which people are less likely to be aware of, include:
- Use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in HDDs. This can be highly problematic for certain types of failure.
- Significantly more advanced self-encrypting-disks (SED) manufactured by Western Digital. From 2019 the encryption/locking method is controlled by the CPU on the printed circuit board.
- Increased use of monolithic chips in memory stick/card manufacture.
- Increased use of encryption across all device types.
- New complex filesystems, including Apple’s APFS.
All of these changes add to the complexity of the recovery of data.
What has not changed?
Customer services; explaining to customers how their device has failed in a clear way in which they can understand, and providing an explanation of what work is required to recover the data with a clear pricing structure provided in advance of receiving the device. Moreover, making sure that the data a customer wants has been successfully recovered and shown by our file listing software.
Unfortunately, it is necessary to report that data recovery scams in the UK are still present. Each week we hear from people who have been convinced into paying hundreds of pounds upfront to a data recovery company. Only to find that their data could not be recovered. This is despite the company advertising ‘no-recovery, no-fee’ in advance of receiving the HDD or SSD. Quite simply if a data recovery company advertises ‘no-recovery, no-fee’ on its website then it should mean it. Do not pay the non-refundable fee.
Finally, what has not changed, is CDR’s determination to recover data from failed devices, even for those devices with complex failures where other companies consider it not cost-effective to spend additional working hours on. View CDR’s gallery of disks that have been worked on before reaching CDR.