Experience with Logicube, Forensic MD5, Disk Tool?
 

After some recent hard drive failures my project is considering investing in some Data Recovery tools. Outsourcing data recovery is expensive and exposes your data to outside entities.

I have been considering a hardware tool, the Forensic MD5, from a company called Logicube.

I was wondering if anyone out there on TFP had experience with data recovery tools and possibly experience with that specific piece of hardware from Logicube?

Have you had any data recovery success stories or failures that would cause you to recommend/not recommend certain tools?

No, no hands-on with Logicube's MD5, but I believe it's more appropriate for evidence preservation than traditional recovery. It won't do anything if the drive is toast.

Are we talking about recovering from data loss, or security issues?

We already know a bullet-proof backup plan is cheaper than one trip to DriveSavers.

My take is that a small minority of drive problems are solved by passive forensic recovery. (I'm not talking about simple deletion, but physical drive problems.) When a drive fails, it can be:

1) motor
2) controller
3) r/w head or positioning components
4) servo data
5) other surface integrity

Easily 90% of the problems I encounter are limited to the first three, or possibly a surface problem caused by the heads. The only time the passive repairs work are when 1-3 are functional. If anything besides the surface has a problem I'm swapping out arms or controller parts anyway, and if that's successful, great, or I use a Windows tool like GetDataBack et al to reconstruct damaged structures. Automated tools help preserve the data and maybe extract/reconstruct degraded areas, but you may still need talented engineers to apply reconstruction methods. That's where the recovery shops earn their money. Most jobs are simple but take hands-on work that an automatic box can't do anyway.

For what it's worth...

Thanks Crynel, it sounds like my program would be better off spending the money on the data recovery services and user education. In this case the user told us that he thought that the Desktop (where he kept all of his folders) was automatically backed up to the network. We have never made such claims and have always instructed users to utilize their network drive for working copies and our document management system for released files.