We are, quite literally, surrounded by particles, pollutants and contaminates that are invisible to the naked eye. Fortunately, the vast majority of them are unhazardous and it’s extremely unlikely that they would cause you any harm. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your hard drive! Don’t worry, you don’t need to keep your HDD in a hermetically sealed environment – it’s only the platter of the drive itself ...
We’re creating data at a truly exponential rate – something that is in no small part down to the growth of smartphones. As these devices are physically small, however, the amount of data that a user can store on them is often limited. With the technological and economic breakthroughs needed to change this still some way away, the need to either free up or create some extra storage space on mobile devices is something...
Cold data storage is the term used to describe the task of storing data that is rarely or potentially never accessed. You may wonder why any individual or organisation would choose to retain this data but there are numerous possible explanations for this. Did you know, for example, that the vast majority of the data that we all create is never accessed? As we’re also creating data at a faster rate than ever before, t...
Smartphone data recovery and variations on this search term have, over the last few years, grown into some of our biggest sources of traffic and enquiries. To understand why, you only need to consider how these devices are now used. Mobile phones first became commonplace when I was in my early teens in the late nineties. The introduction of pay-as-you-go plans proved to be a popular choice for those who’d been concer...
For many years, hard disk drives have been, and still are, the most popular form of storage media. In fact, following them having become affordable and having made floppy disks obsolete, they have become seemingly omnipresent. Just as these drives evolved over time, though (early examples were the size of your average wardrobe and stored only a few kilobytes of data) so have the techniques that we use in order to sto...
Over the past few decades, hard drives have been the most common form of data storage for both individuals and businesses alike. Devices utilising flash media such as SSDs and USB drives have been growing in popularity, though, and are now commonly used in off-the-shelf consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. Many commentators and consumers have argued that this represents a shift in data stora...
For some, the cloud is almost mystical; like the data contained there is somehow metaphysical and is simply pulled out of the air when we retrieve it. The truth is actually much more straightforward. The data that you store in the cloud is actually still present on some type of storage media just like you have in your own devices. The media that holds your data (which is probably a HDD) will be present in a server in...
“How do I recover deleted photos?” is a question Fields Data Recovery’s technicians are asked daily. It may even surprise you to hear that a large number of our technicians feel that recovering digital photo and video files for clients is the most rewarding part of their job – more rewarding than a substantial breakthrough concerning research and development, even – but why? I think it’s because photographs and video...
Hard drives are truly remarkable. They can store gargantuan amounts of data which we rely on every day (hard drive recovery is a service that's always in demand) and do so by using a combination of two things: magnets and binary. Within every hard drive is one or (and this is much more likely with modern hard drives) multiple platters. These are disks made from materials such as aluminium and are coated with a thin l...
Ransomware is a type of computer virus that is used by hackers in order to leverage our growing reliance on the data we have stored on our devices against us for monetary gain. Put simply, once a device is infected with one of these viruses, the data stored on it is encrypted, with hackers then demanding a fee for the decryption key. The data is, quite literally, held to ransom, hence the virus’s name. As you can ima...