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Computer Solutions
of San Diego
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We make your computer do what you want it to do
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The San Diego Union-Tribune
By Suzanne Choney
Personal Technology Editor
November 3, 2003
Their components include plastics, metals and silica. Their contents, in many cases, include our lives. Computers may have been the last things many fire victims grabbed last week, even if they had time to evacuate and take some belongings out of their homes.
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Data recovery experts Dana McPeek (left) and Bill Fulton inspect a computer destroyed by the fire in Scripps Ranch.
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Television footage showed one man cramming a desktop computer into his jammed car. Others managed to grab their laptops. But for many who fled the flames, the computer was an afterthought, if it was a thought at all. That's certainly understandable in such a life-or-death situation.
Still, computers have become repositories for personal photos, videos, documents and financial information. Dana McPeek, a data-recovery specialist, knows that. The Scripps Ranch resident and his family were evacuated from their home on Red Cedar Way, where he said the fire came within 500 feet of their house. His wife "packed up most everything else, and I packed up the computers," McPeek said.
Now he is volunteering to help his fellow residents whose homes were destroyed to see if information from their computers is salvageable. But McPeek, like other experts, does not want to create a sense of false hope. "In data recovery, there are different levels of damage. There is a point of no return in some cases,".
That worst outcome was the result for a Scripps Ranch resident whose home on Kingspine Avenue was destroyed. The owner was out of town the day of the fire. On Tuesday, when he returned to the ruins of his former two-story house, he found a crushed, melted box that was the computer's central processing unit. He took it to McPeek and to Bill Fulton, both colleagues in the data-recovery business.
"The fire was so intense, the hard drive -- which is the most significant part of a computer -- was completely vaporized," McPeek said. The owner kept his computer on the second floor of his house.
"The mechanics of fire is that it typically rises," McPeek said. "If the computer were on a lower floor, and preferably near a wall, which might have protected the system a little bit, it would have had a better chance if the heat were around and above it than underneath it."
Data-recovery experts say fire victims should not assume the information on their left-behind computers is destroyed. While the computers themselves may be useless, the information on the hard drives, inside the computer, may be able to be recovered. Each situation needs to be assessed individually. Experts are familiar with retrieving information from computers that have been submerged in water to those that are fire-damaged as well.
"In some cases, even though the computer looks like a melted blob, if I can get to the hard drive, which contains the data, the hard drive is the only component we need to be able to recover information,". If owners don't know how to remove the hard drive from the central processing unit, they shouldn't try. The experts will do it.
"In data recovery, you usually only have one chance at recovering information," and you don't want to risk throwing that chance away. "We don't need the monitor, keyboard, mouse, cables -- just the hard drive. In these cases, with this melted stuff, just bring the CPU itself."
Many data recovery experts will do a free assessment for a customer. The "hows" of extracting the information are proprietary, something data-recovery experts don't like to share. But in general, it involves the use of special software and hardware. Tim Lider, a senior data-recovery engineer for Advanced Data Solutions in National City, said fire-damaged hard drives need to be completely rebuilt in order to extract data from them. Moreover, they need to be rebuilt in what is known as a "Class 100 clean room," a special room that is supposed to be 100 times more sanitary than a hospital operating room, in which there is "no dust or lint or anything like that," McPeek said.
"People are wearing white gowns, hair nets . . . it's a HEPA-filtered, climate-controlled room." The hard drive's platters, the rotating disks where data are stored, need to be made "smoother than any surface on the planet," so that information can be retrieved.
Rebuilding a hard drive is akin to cloning it. That's because "each hard drive is like a person's fingerprint," he said. "It's unique to them." Every hard drive has "a certain lot number, revision numbers, firmware codes, and we have to match all of that, by finding parts, as closely as possible to get the hard-drive recovery completed,". Experts also can retrieve information from diskettes, CDs and flash-memory media, such as Memory Sticks and Compact Flash cards.
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Prevention pointers
While it may be too late for some of the fire victims, the rest of us can learn from a very painful lesson. There are three steps to take to protect personal data on your computer:
First, BACK UP the information you care about -- photos and financial information, for example -- and don't worry about the software programs themselves (you can always buy or find a copy of those programs somewhere).
What do you use to back up the information? You have many choices, including CDs, DVDs, Zip disks, floppy disks or magnetic tapes.
There are also Web sites where you can store your personal information. Among them: Xdrive.com, MyDocsOnline.com and Driveway.com. San Diego-based Iomega Corp., which makes storage devices, also offers online storage. If you physically back up your data, make multiple copies of those backups.
Second, VERIFY that what you've backed up really exists, that you've done it correctly. "A lot of people think they've backed up, and then they check what they've backed up to find that the information is pure gibberish, or it's all corrupt, that they were copying the wrong information or copying it in bits and pieces," McPeek said. "Back up and verify is the rule of thumb."
Third, STORE COPIES of your backups at locations other than your home for safekeeping. If you have a safe-deposit box, put a set of copies there. Leave a second set at a family member's house, and a third with a friend. "Backing up information, in this case or any others, is the only way to keep from coming to a data-recovery company," McPeek said. "You need to take precautions and cover your bases. People often don't think about this until it happens to them, and then they're devastated."
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