Triple Whammy

When a lightning strike caused a fire that sent a famous Caribbean island home up in smoke, the computer servers were burned and then doused with water by the fire squad. The media then corroded while the building sat idle until it was safe to re-enter. In the end, the triple whammy of a lightning strike, fire and water damage was overcome in the Ontrack Data Recovery cleanroom.

A man encouraged his girlfriend to back up her photo library, which contained thousands of high-resolution photos from her photo studio. She diligently moved the data from her laptop to an external hard drive, and unfortunately that became the only good copy. A friend then pulled into the driveway and the couple went out to meet her, but not before the hyper, happy family dog heard someone at the door and came tearing out from underneath the table where the drive was sitting. The drive went crashing to the floor, damaging the only good copy of this data. Kroll was able to recover all the data from the damaged drive.

A freelance photographer happened to be in the midst of the recent London economic riots. Some rioters saw they were being filmed and opted to smash the camera in order to destroy the potentially incriminating evidence. No worries-Kroll Ontrack was able to recover all the data, and the video footage was supplied to the police.

To avoid arriving late to a business meeting, an IT person opted to put a tape drive on top of the waterproof safe instead of inside it. Within an hour of doing so, the city was struck by a powerful earthquake and the tape was knocked to the ground. Then, mud, water and sand engulfed the premises. The tape looked unrecoverable, but Krolls tape recovery people were able to recover 100 percent of the data, which included one year of TV and Web animations.

A newly hired security guard was doing his first evening security check in a chemical ingredients warehouse. While he was informed that smoking was forbidden, he pondered who could possibly spot him enjoying a cigarette after company hours. After it was lit, the fire alarm sounded and prompted the anti-fire sprinkler system. All the electronic equipment, including 44 desktops and two servers, were flooded. While most of the equipment was damaged beyond repair, Kroll was able to recover the data stored on the desktops and servers.

Two businessmen met in a pub over a beer to discuss their future deal. The server accidently knocked over one of the glasses she was delivering, soaking the laptop, which contained the business plans. A paper towel was not enough to save the laptop and its important deal files. The data was eventually recovered, however.

A corporate accounting department stayed late to reconcile the books for the month. While the team was rejuvenating on a coffee break, a power outage occurred. All the computers shut down, including the financial server. Luckily, the department’s computers were connected to an uninterruptible power supply. However, the continual brewing of their cups of java drained the UPS battery, resulting in a crashed server. The data was eventually recovered, however.

A laptop was set down on a desk near some rare earth magnets. The magnets came into contact with the laptop, and when the user went to turn on the machine, it did not boot up all the way and there was a clicking noise. While there was physical damage to the platters, proprietary techniques overcame the damage and the data was recovered.

To increase system performance, an IT administrator split a partition of his virtual server across two different systems. Later, running out of space, the admin needed to rush and consolidate the partition back onto the same system. Not knowing that the same naming convention already existed on the target system, he copied over the important data set. Unfortunately, there is no way to recover the original data from a disk that has been copied over.

An actress deleted her entire portfolio, including her model card samples and recent pictures, by accidently selecting the wrong externally attached USB drive using the MAC disk utility program. No matter-Kroll Ontrack was able to recover her image entirely.