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> But data is never really unrecoverable. I agree with your comment, but this one sentence is sadly not true. Until last summer, Seagate Recovery Services (for

> But data is never really unrecoverable. I agree with your comment, but this one sentence is sadly not true. Until last summer, Seagate Recovery Services (formerly ActionFront) was a division of the company I work at. Their Canadian lab is still collocated with us. A disk drive I took to them was completely unrecoverable (the head was scraping the platters). Now, partially because I work in the dats protection industry, I had another copy of the data. The point remains that the drive in question is unrecoverable. I'm also aware of, but have no details on, a customer lawsuit that relates to the customers' missing data where the customer misconfigured their backup. Significant chunks of that data are apparently gone forever, too.

frisco 16y ago
A head crash (assuming that's what you're describing when you say, "the head was scraping the platters") is good example of "it's always recoverable with enough money". For example, if you're really willing to spend money, there are special atomic force microscopes ("magnetic force" microscopes) that actually spin around the platter, which stays still, allowing individual bits to be read off of the disk. Of course, if the magnetic field is gone then it's certainly possible for it to be truly unrecoverable, but that bar is very very high. One firm, DriveSavers (which incidentally is who Apple sends all their data recovery problems to), has an ISO-5 cleanroom and maintains a hall-of-fame of ridiculous situations they've successfully recovered: http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-info/museum-of-bizarre-disk-asters/ http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company-info/museum-o...