What to do, after your heart sinks, to save your data
Mother Nature tends takes no mercy on our technological world. If your digital life has been consumed by nature’s wrath, there are steps you can take to safeguard against data loss.
Hurricane Joaquin last week contributed to unprecedented rains and deep flooding across much of the U.S. Atlantic Seaboard, inundating coastal Georgia and parts of New Jersey, and setting precipitation records in North and South Carolina which felt the worst flooding in the region. Human tragedy, lives lost, lives upended and property damage are often the tragic results of extreme weather, and last week was no exception — our hearts and wishes for recovery go out to everyone suffering the effects of the storm.
As if recovering from physical damage and displacement isn’t tough enough, with all the digital data people create and depend on for our work and personal lives these days, each major weather event also reminds us again that our data — even if properly backed up to multiple hard drives — can be fragile and prone to loss in a natural disaster that can be all consuming. The Seagate team wants to ensure that if something like this does occur, there are ways to minimize the damage and increase the chance a professional in-lab recovery team can recover your critical data.
Please keep in mind these tips:
Don’t Try to Power-Cycle Through the Drive(s) — Regardless of if the drive has been drying out. Water has particulates and sediments that will remain on the platter. It will require a cleanroom facility and skilled technicians to properly clean the platters to ensure no further damage is done to the platters and the data.
Don’t Allow For Any Evaporation — If the drive is in water, allow whatever overflows to drain from the drive and immediately store the device in a plastic-zipper kitchen storage bag and seal it. This will buy you a bit of time to review any backups you may have or determine the next best course of action.
Do Not Try and Wick Away the Moisture — Don’t use silicone packets, or the rice tricks we’ve all read about that work on our phones and other electronic devices. It’s extremely important that you do not open the hard drive nor use rubbing alcohol or more water to clean any sediment or salt that may have accumulated. A hard drive is very intricately designed; opening it and cleaning it needs to be left to professionals. Wicking the moisture away from a drive that has sustained water damage will only speed up the corrosion/rusting process.
If, after you’ve assessed the situation, you find you do not have the data backed up in any other location, it’s important to get the device(s) into a cleanroom facility with a team of trained data recovery technicians. The above steps will only delay the corrosion and rusting for a few days at best. If this unit is your only source of critical data, it’s important to proceed with recovery sooner rather than later. This will allow technicians to stabilize the drive and stop the corrosion process in a laboratory setting, maximizing the window of opportunity to get you a good recovery.
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Seagate creates space for the human experience by innovating how data is stored, shared and used. Learn more at www.seagate.com.
