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Disklabs creates data recovery trade association

by Scott Bicheno on 3 April 2009, 11:42

Tags: Disklabs

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qarqd

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Data recovery is one of those industries you don't think about till everything goes horribly wrong.

We all know we should back up all our stuff onto at least an external hard drive and, ideally, remotely too, but how many of us do?

Anyone who's had a hard drive fail on them will be familiar with that feeling of helplessness as you mourn the loss of all that data you previously just took for granted, and that's where data recovery companies like Disklabs come in.

Simon Steggles is a director at Disklabs and he spoke exclusively to HEXUS.channel to share his concerns about the lack of protection offered to end users by the data recovery industry. "Anyone can create a website and claim to be an expert," said Steggles. "Some unscrupulous operations actually make the problem worse and are giving the industry a bad name."

There are resources on the web to help find and engage data recovery services, but there don't appear to be any guarantees of their objectivity. So Steggles has created the International Professional Data Recovery Association (IPDRA), to try to bring a peer review system to his industry. "It's something similar to a kite mark for the data recovery trade," said Steggles.

Now we know what you're thinking: a trade association run by a member of that trade? Surely there's a conflict of interest there. We thought the same, so we emailed a few more questions over to Steggles to try to get to the bottom of the organisation.