Hard Drive Data Recovery | Emergency Storage Media and Data Preservation Procedures After Natural Disaster

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Emergency Preservation Procedures for Storage Media and Data after Natural Disasters

Never assume that data is unrecoverable, no matter what it has been through. These procedures are for any media (hard drives, SSD, flash, tapes, etc.).

General Procedures:
  • If your hard drives submerged in water:
    1. Remove excessive water with rag or towel
    2. Wrap wet hard drive in paper towel - don't use too much paper towel, just 1 layer.
    3. Put drive in double zip lock to prevent air flow and ship it to data recovery imediately. Don't wait until your drive will cover with salt or rust.
  • If your SSD or USB drive submerged in water - rince it with Rubbing Alcohol (purchased at any drug store), dry out and ship it to data recovery imediately.
  • If the device was just wet allow it to dry completely.
  • DO NOT power on wet devices.
  • Make sure you have validated local or cloud backup before starting any data rebuild or backup restore procedure. Backups could be outdated. RAID rebuild or running Windows ChkDsk utility, which can run automatically after post or boot. Any of those procedures can make unrecoverable damage to your data.
  • If you are using RAID controllers with cache - check your cache battery status if you system was off for segnificant amount of time and your system was not shutdown properly.
SHIP YOUR DRIVE FOR RECOVERY IMMEDIATELY. ANY DELAY WILL GREATLY INCREASE THE CHANCE OF UNRECOVERABLE CORROSION DAMAGE AND A PERMANENT LOSS OF DATA.
Packing:
  • Use a box about twice the size of your media.
  • Use enough packing material to allow for NO MOVEMENT of media inside the box.
  • Leave enough barrier room on all sides of the packaged media to absorb any impact the box may take.
  • If you have multiple drives, tapes or other removable media that need recovery, ship them in separate boxes or make sure they are separated enough with packing material so there will be no contact.