accidents happen and the team at drive savers deals with
the fallout of a lot of accidents so they sponsored this video to tour their
sick facility in california to show the process of recovering the data from
mobile devices like iphones that have gone through everything from being
dropped out of a moving car to being thrashed by a gorilla at the zoo to
being literally destroyed in a plane crash this tour is gonna be a little
different though because i'm actually in my studio at home due to travel
restrictions but it'll still be really
cool
every phone recovery starts with educating the customer drive savers data
recovery my name is dylan how can i help you now the average person might think
that data recovery is similar to what the apple store might do but in reality
it is very unusual for data recovery to be covered by any sort of manufacturer
warranty and the process is totally different when you send a device in for
repair it's much more economical for a company like apple to simply replace
whatever is broken rather than spending long hours diagnosing and fixing board
level faults now this would be fine except that they
see components like the main board as one piece so if there's an issue with it
or anything that's attached to it it's gone that means no data they operate
this way because a manufacturer is only concerned with preventing devices from
breaking it's uneconomical to try to fix them once they do which is why the most
straightforward data recovery operations are often though not always the ones
where the issue is logical rather than physical and no hardware actually needs
to be changed and in order to make this process as smooth as possible drive
savers has actually developed their own in-house tools to take out some of the
guesswork something that they're now also using for t2 mac recovery so when a
device arrives drive saver's first step is to give it a once over if it's boot
looping in recovery mode or it powers on
but won't actually boot up there's a good chance that they can connect it
with a lightning cable and perform the recovery that way
very convenient but also dangerous
one of the most important parts of this discovery process is checking the
voltage and amperage of the device certain readings might point to a
particular chip that's failed which could result in a data loss if a logical
recovery is attempted directly it all comes down to experience 0.8 amps or
higher is typical but other readings can be a strong indicator that it's a
physical issue and it's time to crack the casing open
at this stage it's best to start by looking for simple problems like shorts
on the motherboard this can be done by freezing the logic board with a cold
spray and looking for areas that thaw too quickly indicating excess heat or
thanks to the wonders of modern technology it can also be done with a
thermal camera using this method even very small shorts
can be identified although finding the source of the short can be an entirely
separate issue some simple shorts are fixable failed resistors can be replaced
and burnt traces can in some cases be repaired as long as the technician
doesn't drink too much coffee ahead of time i actually asked drive savers what
their most important tool is and i was surprised to hear them say
really while the particular model comes down to personal preference
everyone there agrees that it is absolutely essential that the ends line
up really well otherwise you might be transferring a component to a board only
to have it go flying out and good luck holding on to something like a micro
jumper if the ends don't match up absolutely perfectly those puppies are
thinner than a human hair and even the breeze from someone walking past can
blow them away never to be seen again other times the shorts are more complex
or harder to get at if there's liquid damage you might remove the short only
to find another one then corrosion under the chips and so on and so forth the
worst is apparently milk now with any corrosion you start with a toothbrush if
there's gunk under a chip you remove that chip and replace it if the board is
completely corroded you need to use an ultrasonic cleaner not necessarily a
super strong one you just want to get off as much of the gunk as you can so
that you can start to look for shorts sometimes they're so bad though that
when you start with a soft toothbrush you will literally have components just
crumbling off the board and in cases like that you might end up doing a full
chip swap where you are basically rebuilding the phone onto a donor device
drive savers tries to source individual parts whether new or used but sometimes
there's no other choice but to sacrifice a brand new device i mean look hey we
told you data recovery ain't cheap right unfortunately
yes it gets even worse aside from being a time consuming and risky operation on
components that are ridiculously fragile this chip swap method also has some
major limitations unless they could break apple's
encryption which drive savers wouldn't do even if they could every component
with apple's security measures baked in needs to be restored to at least a basic
level of functionality the nand flash is what actually holds the data in an
iphone so obviously we need that then there's the logic eprom which holds the
firmware of the device that thing is super small about the size
of a large grain of salt and if it disappears your data recovery effort is
done and then finally there's the CPU that's
tied to the eeprom and to the nand flash so for any recovery effort to be
successful it needs to be working or at least mostly working a pretty
famous internal story at drive savers is about an ipad that was pulled from a
literal plane crash the board was so destroyed that it's a miracle they
didn't just turn it away in the first place but after a full transplant as
they call it they were actually able to get the device working enough that with
clamps on the device to apply a little bit of extra pressure on certain
components and by emailing the data to themselves rather than trying to
transfer it over a cable which appeared to put too much strain on the CPU or
something they were able to recover the needed flight recorder data one of their
methods for these CPU transplants is rather ingenious i asked them why a cnc
machine is part of their essential tool kit and it turns out that iphone 6 and
6s have the RAM on top of the CPU with
glue surrounding them so if you use too much heat the RAM can't breathe and
it'll just pop or crack so get this depending on the device they
can sometimes use the cnc to go in through the back precisely cutting away
the logic board leaving only the exact dimensions of the CPU behind
it's slower but it's a really clean way to do it and gives a higher success rate
which is the most important thing they often prep their donor boards in the
exact same way using their cnc from the top side to remove the CPU and RAM and
expose the pads then it's a matter of aligning the solder pads from the old
chip onto the new donor board that is a tough thing to get just right i actually
tried that once with a macbook chipset in new york and
well let's just say it's still dead
fortunately drive savers is better at this stuff than i am and this kind of
careful methodology has resulted in successful full transplants on even
devices that have been driven over multiple times on the highway there's
one that was dropped down a multi-story garbage chute that they pulled off and
yes what i said before was true they actually managed to repair one where a
gorilla like a real actual gorilla got its hands on
the device when it was dropped into a zoo enclosure ironically though after
all this drivesaver's biggest message in this sponsored video is
back up your data so we never have to recover it whether it's on icloud a
network storage device or a usb hard drive a second
physically isolated copy of your important documents in media is the best
insurance policy in the case of an unexpected disaster
now common failures do come from user error
like folks who think their device might be more waterproof than it is you know
hey maybe if i just dip the the camera corner into the water drive savers has
seen plenty of final videos like that but also don't trick yourself into
thinking well i'm super careful it couldn't happen to
me bad luck can happen to anyone and they've seen
everything from phones that managed to slip through the crack in an elevator
and fall all the way down the shaft to ones that fell out of a pocket and got
stuck in the motorized reclining mechanism of a couch that's one that
could easily happen to me my phone comes out of my pocket all the time their
second message is to make sure that if you didn't pay attention to message one
you're paying extra close attention to message two which is to only send your
device to a trusted shop they've seen unrecoverable cases where if it wasn't
for the ineptitude of a previous technician it would have been fine a
classic example of this is iphone 6 screen replacements they had a case
where a shop put a poor quality home button on a 6s
plugged it in and shorted a resistor that on one side went to the home button
and on the other side went to the CPU they did manage to dig out that trace
and replace it but even though it was such a simple error that story
unfortunately ended in heartbreak drive saver's process is to use the device as
intended so a dead CPU that's a no go there's no substitute for
expertise and that's kind of hard to get unless you're dealing with a lot of
devices an example of this one was a weird update in the fall of 2019 where
particularly the seven plus would get stuck on the apple logo which on the
surface smells like a logical problem but then after seeing a bunch of them
drive savers figured out that there was a physical fix by shorting the speaker i
see that would somehow bypass whatever that logical problem was
so then if they grabbed all the data unshorted a particular resistor then
performed a factory reset and restored the data back onto the phone it was
golden logical problem weird physical
workaround so bottom line back up your data and if you didn't give drive savers
a call they're well worth the money and after being the first to recover data
from one they have over a decade of experience recovering iphones they don't
even charge you unless they actually recover your data the consult and even
the shipping to them is free if you guys enjoyed this video you might
also enjoy a look at drive saver's hard drive data recovery process it's very
very different and equally fascinating we're gonna have that linked below and
we did that video a long time ago so it i was actually able to physically be
there