You'd never know it from the outside
But in there through those doors is one of the world's oldest and most
advanced data recovery companies. Drive Savers headquarters here in Novato, California
features almost a hundred employees
Almost that many security certifications and a two
million dollar ISO five clean room and
they sponsored us down here to have a close look at how it is they take this and
Turn it in to this
So let's go inside
( Intro Music plays)
We're gonna kick things off in the museum
as
Long as our escort says that that's okay
Security is a huge
Deal at Drive Savers not just on the outside of the building, but also throughout it, so guests get these incredible
badges that actually change color over time
eventually turning red so that anyone who sees it will know to - kick me out or call the cops and
everything in here is on a need to access basis with biometric security on secure spots and
Annual background checks for all staff members So these guys have recovered data from pretty much
everything that you would normally think of - hard drives phones laptops SSDs and
From a lot of things that you probably wouldn't think of
defibrillators photocopy machines and even a TiVo so the museum here contains many of their biggest success stories both
in terms of the importance of the data
That was recovered, uh they once saved Twisted Sisters Christmas album and twelve episodes of The Simpsons
Including the conclusion of the who shot mr.. Burns cliffhanger during a national contest to guess who did it and
in terms of the difficulty so
run over by an 18-wheeler check, lit on fire
Check buried in a mudslide check that too - this one that you're looking at right now was actually pulled from a sunken
Cruise ship after sitting underwater for two days, it had the owner's memoirs
Successfully recovered from it now. Let's talk about how they do it
Consultation and in some cases even diagnosis with an analysis of what data they expect to get back is free
so you send in your drive, we're shipping sorts it into a colored bin according to the priority of the job and the uhh (cough)
Cleanliness of the drive or device and you might think to yourself ah come on. It's a hard drive
how dirty could it be, but they've actually had to obtain a Geiger counter to evaluate the
radioactivity of drives coming out of nuclear disasters
And through some of their forensics work
They've even seen devices come through here that were found on murder victims
One phone apparently had the camera element gouged out
Before being placed back on the victim's body in an apparent attempt, to get rid of the photos
So yeah drive savers got that **** back good work idiot
Hope prisons treating you well, from shipping your bin travels to one of a few different places
and we'll go through those in a minute, but
Everything will eventually get the cloning treatment and that starts here drive savers keeps a huge inventory of spare
Wiped donor drives because, you dramatically improve your chances of recovery if you're working with a bit 4-bit
Digital copy of your data set it gives you the time to analyze more than just what files were there and then dig into
Who accessed them when, what did they do?
These kinds of things can be particularly important in cases of corporate intellectual property protection for example
Where there might have been some attempt to destroy data or cover up a data access
The folks in this room also do the initial analysis of raid arrays using
Software tools like the one you're looking at here to rebuild the array logically and determine which drives are probably working fine
Versus which ones will likely need physical repairs before making a cloning attempt, and they've got the hardware for everything from
Reconstructing a - a four drive home Nazare to this over here. This is a 45 drive j baud
That's on standby waiting for I don't know maybe another
96 drive server that got gallons of water dumped on it due to a sprinkler system malfunction because, yeah
That was a thing that happened
but as you saw in the museum a
Lot of the hard drives that come through here need a lot more than a little bit of software rika jiggering so
Welcome to the clean-room!
Or strictly speaking. This is the inventory room and the cleaner was on the other side of the glass, but but this stuff's cool
Too in here, they've got basically every hard drive. You could imagine. They've got two and a half inch!
they've got three and a half inch!
They've got Todd the latest helium sealed drives and all the way from the latest to look at these
Clunkers, I mean look at this, this is called a mini scribe
I guess you know relative to this guy
It is pretty mini, but basically the point is
Whatever the text on the other side of the glass inside that is o5 cleanroom so that is less than 100
Thousand point one micron particles per cubic meter ten thousand times cleaner than a normal room, whatever they need
They put a request onto this little cart. It comes out here. We load it up
We fire it back in there and whether it's a brand new driver an ancient one they start the process of
Rebuilding one working drive from the donor and the recipient
Now they did put away some of the proprietary equipment that they use, uh for example
They found a way to work on helium sealed drives, which won't function at all in regular air
That's seven times more dense and so they wouldn't show us like I don't know how they either
Reseal them or put them in a helium chamber or something, but this place is still
incredible, so thanks to the
34 filtered fans air is circulated in here so quickly that it's not only clean
But they can actually do soldering work
Anywhere in this room without disrupting anyone else's sensitive recovery operation
incredible, and an
operation it is
They actually agreed to let us do an actuator swap so
Stay tuned for that video because I'm super stoked for you guys to see it. Anyway for now let's continue our journey so then
With the drive physically working, I mean it's copying data. They can just ,send it back to you, right
wrong so this guy right here is
Working, but it is not reliable drive savers wouldn't be able to keep their warranty approved service status with
Every major hard drive vendor for very long if they pulled that kind of a stunt so the next step, then is
Logical recovery where, maybe not all but some of the data should be recoverable even in cases of severe physical
Damage, like we saw downstairs in the museum, and we're going to head over there
But first we need to make a quick stopover in flash memory town now hard drive recovery is complicated
Flash memory hoho well, that's a whole other ballgame son.
So what you're looking at here is raw ones and zeros off a flash chip
So you can think of it kind of like a QR code?
except that there is no app for your phone to read it and
Making matters even more difficult this middle spare area part right here
Well, that contains information about where the block numbers are where your ECC belongs etc. It's such a really good stuff except
Oh wait
That gets intentionally scrambled in many cases as a security measure
So figuring out which bytes are bad and getting the whole thing to turn green
Takes a lot of knowledge and then to do it quickly takes years of
Experience and even getting it to that point isn't trivial in many cases flash memory chips require
proprietary not to mention expensive readers and
They come from devices, but don't always want to give them up easily including everything from
standard Apple or MDOT 2 to SSDs and computers to, camcorders
Mp3 players like what year is it?
I know right. and even bear flash chips that are soldered on to the motherboard like in some of the latest Mac books
THANK YOU APPLE and the craziest part is coming back to device security again on a
Device with a security module, like an iPhone for example, so you can see in this footage
They're taking apart and iPhone 10 for us that might later
Be used as a known good for a customer recovery attempt. You could actually need at least
FOUR components to even hope to pull data off of it the NAN flash itself, which needs to be de
solder from the board and
The baseband I see the controller which you can actually see from this disassembled A8 chip
actually sits under the RAM with contacts on the top and bottom and
The ROM. So four parts, which means that if you were to hope to pull data from a badly damaged, one of these
You would need to desolder, clean, reball, and resolder all of these four components
successfully to a donor phone and did I mention by the way that even the couple generations old A8 processor already had
eleven-hundred contact points, so they apparently haven't attempted an operation like this with the ten YET
But they think that it might be possible (#MIND BLOWN LINUS)
Finally we're in
Logical land now stuff without any physical damage to the hard drive itself may end up coming straight here like
Let's say for example
You plug the wrong power supply into your external drive enclosure like this and it released all of its magic blue smoke
Tella he actually sent this drive to drive savers four years ago
But ended up opting not to go forward with the recovery service
So as you can see from what we pulled off of this drive. It's clear that for some people
It's not necessarily going to make sense necessarily
to pay for data recovery if all you've got that's
Not backed up somewhere is
Clips from a Cheech and Chong live concert. With that said, even around here at Drive savers where their bread and butter is
failed or corrupted devices, they still absolutely
preach the principles of data
backup, because
the cold hard truth is even if you are an extremely skilled data recovery
engineer there are still things that can take out your storage
permanently. So I think a perfect example of that is our host today, Mike, ended up losing
pretty much all of his data in the Santa Rosa fires. So even though he's an executive here at DriveSavers
there was nothing he would have been able to do about that if he hadn't had an
off-site backup. So at the end of the day, that's the takeaway guys.
Make backups of your data; the three-two-one principle should never be ignored
But in the event that something goes terribly wrong
Drive savers has got your back. I want to thank them for making this video possible
I want to thank you guys for watching and you can check out the link to drive savers in the video description (bloopers time!)
Yeah, no no. No I think I can I think I can do it no problem this time. OK OK (SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE AWSOME CONTENT)