Disklabe to the rescue
Disklabs
The CTS 2006 Show was home to over 250 exhibitors but few were as interesting as Disklabs, a Midlands-based company that specialises in data recovery and computer forensics.
We got the chance to chew some juicy fat with Simon Steggles, one of Disklabs' directors and all-around nice guy, who seems to be the man to call if you have a data-loss crisis on your hands.
Disklabs main interest lies with recovering data from failed hard drives, but it can retrieve and restore data from almost every media. It was surprising to learn how many users, be they major FTSE100 companies or Joe Bloggs in Swindon, don't backup crucial data. Simon regaled us with a tale of him flying out to Turkey, with a small server as hand luggage, to ensure that a rather large and famous company didn't lose any more downtime due to hard-drive failure.
Accidental erasure, fire, power surges, and file corruption are just some of the causes for data loss, and Disklabs' expertise, built up over the last 7 years, Simon reckons, allows it to recover data in >97% of cases. That's assuming you haven't, in a fit of anger, taken a hammer to the platters, of course.
One exciting area Disklabs is involved in is computer forensics. It's helped retrieve and supply data in legal cases where incriminating evidence was left on some form of media. You'd better check your hard drive(s) now for something that shouldn't be there :). Further afield, mobile phone and sat-nav forensics is a burgeoning industry that Disklabs has branched into.
A rapidly expanding company whose work is genuinely interesting. We'll be taking an in-depth look at Disklabs in the near future. Stay tuned.
