Vishal's Blog 

Data-loss is not uncommon. Sooner or later one faces it, in one form or the other.

And when it happens to us, some of us leave it, not giving it much thought, some of us make our best attempts to retrieve it. If we're successful, great, if not, we let go of it then. Though, what we do not realize is that in majority of the cases, the data can still be recovered, barring cases where the physical medium carrying the data is damaged, of course.

So here's my question, what if the data you thought was lost, isn't and can still be recovered? Worse, what if you've given up on it, but someone else has recovered it and has full access to it? Scary thought? Yes. Improbable? No, because this is exactly what I witnessed a couple of months ago.

Back in January, I found myself running out of disk space on my system. I decided to go for an external HDD and without ample research (big mistake) I chose Maxtor Basics Portable 250 GB portable hard drive, hoping to put my "storage worries" to ease… or so I thought.

Initially things went pretty smooth and I found myself enjoying my newly purchased piece of hardware and was using it on a daily basis and was moving my important data including photos, documents, project backups, etc. slowly and gradually to the drive.

One fine day, to my dismay, my system running on Windows XP SP3, simply refused to recognize it. Instead, it claimed that it had found some new hardware and that it needed drivers to install it. Reeling from the shock, I tried the standard diagnostics, plugging, unplugging, rebooting system, etc, didn't work. I assumed that the drivers for my USB port may have been corrupted so I booted to linux (Ubuntu) but that didn't help either.

The drive had crashed!

And so began the data-recovery operations in hope that I might be able to recover some, if not all of my data. The next day, I took it to a friend's house, plugged it to his system, same thing. I tried another friend and lo, this time I got lucky, it worked! I wasted no time. I immediately moved all of the stuff on it to my friend's hard drive and so that I can later burn them on DVDs.

I went to the store where I had bought it from and filed it for replacement (another big mistake!) The owner of the store assured me that I would be getting a replacement within two weeks, which, evidently was not going to happen.

Two months later (59 days to be precise), after repeated requests over several calls I finally got the replacement. The store guy came to my home an delivered to me an 'un-pakced' copy of the drive. When I protested that it was not new, he assured me that all replacements arrive like this only. Yet, still after finally getting it, I was not ready to use it fearing that what happened before may happen again. I thought that if I wanted assurance of the safety of my data on this drive, I need to test it thoroughly. Thus, over the next few days I performed various tests on it, the majority of them involving writing data to it and reading it back. All the tests went without a hitch.

And then it struck me, what if I accidentally deleted a file on the portable drive? Would I be able to recover it? Another test! I copied the a 4 GB image of a linux distro to it and did a shift-delete. For the recovery, I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Stellar Phoenix data recovery suite and started the recovery process, having absolutely no idea what I was about to see.

Was Stellar Phoenix able to find the deleted image? Yes, it did find the image, in fact it found something more, a lot lot more!

As I saw the list of files that the software suggested could be recovered, populate in front of me, I was surprised for a second and when it hit me what was going on, shocked.

The software stated that it had found, photos, audio files, video files, various documents, source code files for various projects, etc. which was good except, none of them were mine!

That's right, I had accidentally stumbled across someone else's valuable and confidential data.

But how did this happen? Apparently, some guy had bought the same model of this drive from the same store which I had purchased mine. Then, he must've faced the same problem which I did and had asked the store for a replacement. The store guy, presumably, must have switched the drives, or least gave me his, in effect, cheating us both.

When I called that fellow after getting his number from a document from the hard drive, he was presumably more shocked then I was. I offered him to take the drive, retrieve his data and return it to me, which he thankfully accepted.

So what do we learn from this?

1. Never, ever buy an electronic gadget/computer accessory without doping ample market research. Hardware guys/store owners will insist on selling you a particular brand just because they tend to earn more profit out of it.
2. In case of replacement, always check if the product manufacturer provides a direct way of procuring one, luckily most of them do. Seagate, for instance provides home pick-up and drop replacement service. This, not only assures you that your issue is being take care of by the intended people but you can also keep a track of it progress by following your request status on it's website.
3. Always, always shred your data, which you no longer need, I always do! Whenever you're shift-deleting a document, don't assume it's gone forever. If you're new to shredding data, it's a process by which a 'shredder' application simply overwrites the physical location of a given file on your storage media, several times, with random data, thus making it unrecoverable. There are a lot of shredders available out there, both commercial and freeware. I would recommend Eraser which is available freely under GNU General Public License. The best part of Eraser being that it's also available in a portable version which means you need not install it in order to run it. I would also recommend checking out these free shredders.

I would love to hear back from you about your similar experiences or feedback on this article.

Thanks!

Further Reading:

• Data Remanence