Profile: DriveSavers stays true to data-recovery roots

DriveSavers takes data recovery seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the company recently installed a $2 million cleanroom complex in its Novato, Calif., headquarters. In this 2,000 square foot facility, DriveSavers can unseal and open up hard drives for diagnosis and repair without dust-borne contamination assaulting the now-naked spinning platters and swiftly seeking head assemblies.

Hard drives are delicate machines—even the tiniest speck of dust can render them inoperable. Destructive dust, however, has been effectively banished from the new Class 100 cleanroom, allowing DriveSavers engineers to open, repair, and begin data recovery of ailing hard drives without fear of damaging them further.

As impressive as the new facility is, the value of its specialized equipment and precision tools pales in comparison to the most critical element in DriveSavers’ data-recovery arsenal—its experienced and tenacious engineers.

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DriveSavers takes data recovery seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the company recently installed a $2 million cleanroom complex in its Novato, Calif., headquarters. In this 2,000 square foot facility, DriveSavers can unseal and open up hard drives for diagnosis and repair without dust-borne contamination assaulting the now-naked spinning platters and swiftly seeking head assemblies.

Hard drives are delicate machines—even the tiniest speck of dust can render them inoperable. Destructive dust, however, has been effectively banished from the new Class 100 cleanroom, allowing DriveSavers engineers to open, repair, and begin data recovery of ailing hard drives without fear of damaging them further.

As impressive as the new facility is, the value of its specialized equipment and precision tools pales in comparison to the most critical element in DriveSavers’ data-recovery arsenal—its experienced and tenacious engineers.

Engineering as a healing art

Like medicine, the healing of a sick storage system is as much an art as it is a science. And like doctors, the DriveSavers engineers consult with one another, confer on courses of treatment, and take their work very seriously. They even have their own version of the Hippocratic oath’s central tenet, “Do no harm.” As cleanroom manager and 12-year DriveSavers veteran Ed Sit put it, “If it’s not broke, don’t break it more.”

In DriveSavers Class 100 cleanroom, hard drives can be operated with their cases open without fear of being contaminated by drive-destroying dust.

“Do no harm” is more than a slogan at DriveSavers; it’s the basis of the company’s workflow. When a sick storage system is brought into the company’s hardware hospital, it’s given a preliminary examination in what Sit refers to as the “triage area.” After diagnosis, 95 percent of ailing drives are sent into the cleanroom for disassembly, repair, and preliminary data recovery. There, a team of seven veteran engineers transfers the drive’s data onto another drive after repairing the malfunctioning drive using parts from an on-site, 20,000-drive inventory. After the sickly drive has yielded its raw data, it’s no longer part of the workflow—it’s laid aside, and all further recovery work is done on the data now moved to its clone.

The recovered data is then transferred from the clone to DriveSavers’ immense and highly secure storage network, which includes 65TB of 24/7 online storage, with another 100TB of near-line backup. Due to the sensitivity of much of the data that DriveSavers saves—clients include major financial services, Hollywood filmmakers, and the U.S. Government—the company has deployed a Cisco Self-Defending Network architecture to keep even the most resourceful hackers from snooping.

Reassembling files

Electrically grounded coveralls, hood and mask, safety glasses, and latex gloves: the all-day uniform of a cleanroom engineer.

After the physical repair and data-collection has been performed by the cleanroom team, the recovered raw data is reassembled into files by what DriveSavers refers to as its “logical group.” Here the often-tedious detective work of file identification transforms what director of Mac/Unix engineering, Mike Cobb, describes as “just ones and zeros” into its anxious owner’s customer records, financial data, or digital media.

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