Kroll Ontrack’s Top 10 Data Disasters and Recoveries of 2014

by Chris Preimesberger

A firefighter was fighting a fire when his Nokia Lumia 610 was damaged by water. He lost all of his data, including photos of family and friends. Kroll Ontrack was asked to help and successfully recovered 732 photos from the phone.

A company was preparing for a new IT infrastructure. The new storage array was waiting to be unpacked and powered up in the server room. The day before connecting it, the old storage array broke down and access to critical data was lost. After few minutes of panic and stress, an IT administrator decided not to make the situation worse and called the specialists at Kroll Ontrack. Everything ended positively.

Kroll Ontrack received a call from a person who was in a ferry accident. His camera had been submerged in the water for over an hour. Ontrack Data Recovery specialists were able to recover the photos from the corroded memory card.

A dog mistook a USB flash drive for a chew toy. When the drive arrived at Kroll Ontrack, it had teeth marks all over it. The dog eventually made it out of the doghouse because all of the USB drive data was recovered.

Sometimes we don’t get the story behind what happened to a device. Kroll Ontrack received a Microsoft Surface “smashed” into pieces. All that is known is that data recovery was 100 percent successful.

A flood in the Balkan countries swept a RAID server 100 meters from the building it originated in. It took two weeks to locate the server where it had been sitting in water the entire time. Kroll Ontrack recovered 100 percent of the data.

When data loss is intentional, it’s usually with malicious intent. Hackers infiltrated a hotel this year, deleting all of the active and backup data for 35 LUNs. Kroll’s team of highly trained engineers worked onsite and remotely to recover all of the data that was lost.

Even Kroll Ontrack employees are not immune to data loss. While visiting the restroom in between meetings, a Kroll employee slipped her iPhone into the back pocket of her pants for safe keeping. As she stood up and picked up her briefcase to exit, the phone escaped, landing squarely in the toilet. Dripping wet, the employee brought her personal phone to the mobile recovery specialist in the clean room with a plea for help. No questions asked, engineering took on the case. All of the employee’s phone data, including her photos of her daughter, contacts and text messages, was recovered.

A young woman was taking pictures on her smartphone of a beautiful waterfall when a gust of wind drenched her with spray from the waterfall. She was covered in water and so was her phone. The woman lost access to her phone and all of her photos, but Kroll performed a full recovery, returning the photos and the phone in working order.

From the client’s perspective: “My laptop did not want to follow my instructions. We totally disagreed with each other, and I lost my temper, hitting it strongly with an open hand. The laptop drive was damaged—that’s why I’m here.” At odds with his computer, the client hit the laptop directly in the place where the drive resided, and that resulted in the head scratching the platters. There was extensive damage, but Kroll Ontrack recovered 50 percent of the crucial data.