Data recovery FAQ: answers to your questions

Yes. The diagnostic analysis is free and delivered in less than 3 hours upon receipt of your tape. A detailed quote is provided to you before any intervention.

Yes. The diagnostic analysis is free and delivered in less than 3 hours upon receipt of your tape. It determines the nature of the failure and the exact cost of the data recovery.

Yes. The diagnostic analysis is free and delivered in less than 3 hours upon receipt of your tape.

Yes, the diagnostic is 100% free and without obligation. Upon receipt of your media, our technicians perform a complete analysis within 3 hours and send you a detailed quote. You are free to accept or reject the quote without charge.

JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) is an aggregate of multiple hard drives operating in sequential writing. Unlike RAID 0, data is written entirely to the first hard drive in the aggregate. Once it is full, writing continues on the second disk, and so on until the last disk in the array.

Consequence in case of failure: If a defective disk contains data, it is inaccessible until the disk is repaired or replaced. Unlike RAID 1 or RAID 5, JBOD offers no redundancy: the loss of a disk results in the loss of all the data it hosts.

No. We regularly process DAT tapes that are more than 20 years old. The aging of the magnetic oxide is one of our specialties. The sooner you entrust the tape to us, the better the chances of recovery.

A hard drive damaged by fire or flood presents a serious physical failure requiring specialized intervention. Disasters of this type cause several types of cumulative damage:

• Thermal damage (fire): melting of electronic components, deformation of magnetic platters, carbonization of read heads
• Water damage (flood): moisture infiltration into the housing, oxidation of circuits, deposits of limescale or mud on the platters
• Combined damage: electronic short circuit, corruption of magnetic sectors, firmware failure

In most cases, yes. The most frequent causes are oxide degradation, a defective streamer, or a software compatibility issue. Our team has mastered all of these scenarios.

A hard drive that has been dropped is a storage device that has been physically damaged due to a mechanical impact, most often affecting the read/write heads or the surface of the magnetic platters. According to DriveSavers Data Recovery data, more than 40% of physical hard drive failures result from a shock or fall. If your hard drive no longer starts after a fall, do not attempt to restart it: each additional attempt risks aggravating the damage and reducing the chances of data recovery by up to 60% (source: Ontrack, 2023).

In the vast majority of cases, yes. A smartphone that no longer starts does not mean that the data is lost. The memory chip (eMMC/UFS) that stores your photos, contacts, and applications is separate from the processor and faulty power components.

Common causes of a phone that won't turn on include:

• Faulty or depleted battery — data is intact
• Damaged motherboard (drop, overheating) — recovery possible by chip extraction
• Corrupted software (failed update, rooting) — recovery via recovery mode or direct extraction
• Water damage — see the appropriate emergency procedure

Our technicians first assess the cause of the failure, then choose the appropriate extraction method (JTAG, ISP, or chip-off for the most complex cases).

A factory reset erases the file system, but on most Android tablets, the physical data remains partially present on the NAND memory until it is overwritten by new data.

On iPads, encryption is recreated during a reset, and previous data becomes inaccessible — recovery without an iCloud backup is then very difficult.

For Android tablets that have undergone a reset, the more the device is used after the reset, the lower the chances of recovery. In the lab, direct memory chip extraction (chip-off) offers the best chance of recovering partial or complete data.

No, the data is not lost. A charging problem is related to the battery, the connector, or a power component — not the memory chip. Your files remain intact on the internal memory.

If the tablet no longer starts due to a lack of battery, our technicians can:

• Replace the battery or directly power the motherboard to access the data
• Extract the NAND memory directly if the motherboard is defective

Data recovery is possible in the vast majority of cases, even if the tablet is permanently out of service.

RAID 0 is a storage configuration that distributes data in blocks across multiple hard drives simultaneously (a technique called striping). Each file is fragmented into several pieces distributed across all the disks in the array. In the absence of redundancy, the failure of a single disk renders 100% of the data inaccessible, as the missing fragments make each file incomplete and unreadable. According to industry statistics, the risk of total data loss in RAID 0 is proportional to the number of disks: a 4-disk RAID 0 quadruples the risk of failure compared to a single disk.

RAID 1 is a mirrored storage configuration in which each piece of data is written simultaneously to two or more disks, providing complete redundancy. If one disk fails, the data remains accessible on the intact mirror disk(s).

RAID 5 is a redundant storage configuration that distributes data and parity across a minimum of 3 hard drives, allowing for the failure of a single drive without data loss. If one of your drives is defective, your RAID 5 remains functional but switches to degraded mode: all data remains accessible, but any additional failure would result in total data loss.