Data Recovery Services by Seagate Recovery Services

Removable Media

1. Examples of Data Loss Situations - Removable Media

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Recovery from physical and logical damage due to mechanical failure, software corruption or human error.

• Inaccessible media
• Corrupted data
• Virus
• Fire & water damage
• Media surface contamination and damage
• Accidental reformatting
• Accidental deletion of data

2. The Recovery Process

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Initial diagnosis determines whether the media is accessible to our lab equipment. If so, the first priority is to create a raw image of the data on ActionFront media so that logical analysis can determine the nature of the data loss situation. If the media is inaccessible our lab will test the components and closely examine its internal health to determine the extent of physical damage.

Recovery of crashed hard disks often involves replacing failed or damaged components in a clean environment and using specialized hardware and software tools to create the raw image. Failed components typically include electronics, read/write heads, head assemblies, magnets & drive motors.

Logical recovery uses the raw image by examining the low-level data sectors and determining what fixes to filesystem structures are needed to get access to the important data. Sometimes the existing filesystem structures are missing or damaged so much that data has to be extracted directly from one or more fragments of the raw image.

ActionFront Data Recovery Labs programmers have created a full set of software tools used by our technicians to analyze, fix & recover data from raw images of all operating systems. Once a recovery has been successfully performed, file lists are created and data validity is checked.

3. Typical Recovery Price Ranges for Removable Storage Media

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4. Turn Around Time

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ActionFront has geared its entire service to recover your data as fast as possible. When dealing with such a wide variety of problems, estimating time before the problem is diagnosed is difficult. That is why, each recovery case starts with a diagnostic evaluation.

The evaluation is started immediately on receipt of the media and generally takes 2 to 24 hours to complete. The process involves several hours of work and testing. (Mirroring alone may take up to 24 hours of computer time with extensive re-tries for badly damaged devices.)

Complete recovery turn-around time including analysis and recovery is usually between 1 and 5 days. Some severe cases can take considerably more time.

Our hours of operation are 9am to 7pm Local Time Monday to Friday (All Labs), 9am to 5pm Saturday (Toronto Lab only). If you have an emergency situation, we have technical staff on call for weekends and after hours in all locations.

Time estimates are based on procedures and expertise required to recover the data you require. You are not charged by the hour. A firm quote is provided for your approval following the evaluation.

5. Removable Types, Brands, Models and Interfaces

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6. Preserving your Warranty

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ActionFront has established agreements with most storage media manufacturers regarding preserving warranty during data recovery service. See List of Manufacturers. If your manufacturer is not in the list, please call as ActionFront has agreements with additional manufacturers which have requested us not to post their company name.

If the seals on the media must be broken in order to extract data, ActionFront will re-seal the media upon completion of service with a tamper resistant sticker which the manufacturer will accept for warranty purposes. You will also receive an invoice receipt to indicate you have pursued data recovery services with ActionFront.

How to Submit a Recovery Case

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Fill out the Online Evaluation Request form or the Printable Evaluation Request form and send it to ActionFront with your media for recovery.

Shipping locations are indicated on the Request Forms. Driving directions with maps can be found here.

Careful packaging is important to perserve delicate electro-magnetic storage media. See Packaging Instructions to help avoid shipping damage.

Critical Response Services

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If you have a critical situation and need immediate help, Call Us. The Critical Response Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In Lab Service

This service is for mission critical data recovery, where the media can be taken to one of our labs. In the lab, dedicated resources and critical response team members are committed round the clock to your recovery case until its resolution.

Onsite Service Q

This service is available for situations where immediate shipping to one of our labs is not feasible or desirable. A tech or team of techs can be dispatched to stabilize and analyze the circumstances of your failure. Response is as fast as it takes to catch the next plane to your location. This service is not for everybody but if you have a situation that merits this level of service, ActionFront is ready to help.

The Critical Response Team is comprised of our best data recovery technicians. They are called on for every kind of situation imaginable from multiple drive multi-Gigabyte and Terabyte RAID servers , Jukeboxes, custom installations and configurations, SQL Database corruption, to tape failure and custom file extraction from corrupted backup sets. Whatever the situation, these techs are ready to help.