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 nevado california features almost a hundred employees
almost that many security certifications
and a 2 million iso 5 clean room
and they sponsored us down here to have a close look at how it is they take
this and turn it into this
so let's go inside
we're gonna kick things off in the museum uh
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 ativo 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 12 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
owners 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 where shipping
sorts it into a colored bin according to the priority of the job and the uh
cleanliness of the drive or device and you might think to yourself oh 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 prism's 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
for 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 four drive home nas
array to this over here this is a 45 drive jbod 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
reconjiring so welcome to
the clean room or strictly speaking this
is the inventory room and the clean room is 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 uh 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 iso 5 clean room
so that is less than 100 000.1 micron particles per cubic meter
10 000 times cleaner than a normal room whatever they need
they put a request onto this little card it comes out here we load it up we fire
it back in there and whether it's a brand new drive or 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
for example they found a way to work on helium seal 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
well that's a whole other ball game 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
really good stuff except oh wait that gets intentionally scrambled in many
cases as a security measure so figuring
out which bites 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 that
don't always want to give them up easily including everything from standard apple
or m.2 ssds and computers to camcorders
mp3 players like what year is it i know right and even bare flash chips that are
soldered onto the motherboard like in some of the latest macbooks 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 an 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 nand flash itself
which needs to be desoldered from the board and the baseband ic 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 re-ball and
re-solder 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
1100 contact points so they apparently
haven't attempted an operation like this with the 10 yet but they think that it
might be possible
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
pella 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
chichen chang 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 drive savers 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 321 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
yeah no no no i think i can i think i can do it no problem okay you get better
angles okay