We recently got a call from a Dublin based tour guide company. They organise trips around the capital and Ireland. They are now coming into their busiest season. They have tourists arriving from all over the world to enjoy the Irish culture and hospitality.
Unfortunately, last week, one of the reservations agents experienced hard drive failure on her Toshiba laptop. They had an online backup, but when they downloaded it, most of the data turned out to be corrupt. (This is not uncommon with some online backup providers) This put them in a very precarious position. Key information and itineraries were all stored on the drive. Not only was their data at stake so was their reputation.
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Our diagnosis revealed that the drive had a failed ROM chip. The ROM chip on the PCB stores servo-adaptive information needed for the drive to initialise and run properly. The data recovery process involved de-soldering the chip from the PCB. We then used a replacement board, which we already had in stock, and re-soldered an exact match ROM chip back on.
The data recovery was a success. The drive initialised with a healthy spin. We then imaged the drive and extracted all of their data. This data was put on an external USB drive. Now, none of their client’s trips to Ireland will be inconvenienced due to lost itineraries.
We recommended to this company that online backup alone is not sufficient for a safe backup. Ideally, they should have had a backup stored locally as well. We provided them with some tips on how to prevent this from ever happening again.