 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data Recovery [1] |
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Jay Hagan, Scott Gaidano |
| Headquarters | |
Key people | Alex Hagan, CEO Scott Moyer, President Jay Hagan, Chairman |
| Website | drivesaversdatarecovery.com |
DriveSavers, Inc. is a computer hardware data recovery company located in Novato, California. [2] [3] [4] It was founded by former CEO Jay Hagan and former company President Scott Gaidano in 1985. [5] [6] [7]
In 1985, former Jasmine Technologies executives Jay Hagan and Scott Gaidano founded DriveSavers, operating from Gaidano’s condo with $1,400. [6] [5] [7] [8] DriveSavers originally offered both hard drive repair and data recovery services, but the company dropped its drive repair services within its first eight months. [7] In 1992, DriveSavers signed an agreement with SuperMac Technology to assume technical support and warranty obligations for SuperMac Mass Storage Products. [9]
The company merged with Data Recovery Disk Repair in 1994 and retained the DriveSavers name. [6] In 2008, DriveSavers invested two million dollars to build a series of five ISO-certified cleanrooms to disassemble and rebuild damaged hard drives. [10] [2] [6] [8] From 2004-2009, the company grew from 35 to 85 employees. [11]
DriveSavers also works with "the more secretive" branches of government and celebrities. [5] [11] In order to provide comfort and assistance to clients with a data loss situation, DriveSavers has had on staff an individual "data crisis counselor." [12] [13] This counselor has had experience in working for a suicide hotline.
DriveSavers is the only recovery firm licensed with every major hard-drive manufacturer, so their work on a drive does not void the warranty. [5] It can recover data from hard disk drives, solid state drives, smart phones, servers, digital camera media and iOS devices. [10] [3] [14] [15] [16] The company can recover data from T2 and M1-powered Macs with embedded SSD storage. [17] Even with cloud backup, personal data loss is still possible, but can be recovered. [3] The company recovered data from old floppy disks of the deceased creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, potentially containing lost episodes of the franchise. [18]
DriveSavers is certified HIPAA-compliant, undergoes annual SOC2 Type II reviews and has encryption training certificates from GuardianEdge, PGP, PointSec and Utimaco. [2] [19]
DriveSavers facility is made up of cleanrooms. [20] The cleanrooms come in different ratings depending on the application and range from federal standards of 100,000 to 100. The rating is a measure of the number of 0.1-micron-sized airborne particulates per square meter.
DriveSavers employees have to go through background checks, because of contracts with state, and federal government agencies. The company also has to meet data-security standards its clients do, like HIPAA certification to work with hospitals and GLBA certification to work with financial institutions.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
A RAM drive is a block of random-access memory that a computer's software is treating as if the memory were a disk drive. RAM drives provide high-performance temporary storage for demanding tasks and protect non-volatile storage devices from wearing down, since RAM is not prone to wear from writing, unlike non-volatile flash memory. They are in a sense the reverse of virtual memory: RAM drive uses a volatile fast memory as if it's a nonvolatile slow memory. Virtual memory is the opposite.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
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In computing, a removable media is a data storage media that is designed to be readily inserted and removed from a system. Most early removable media, such as floppy disks and optical discs, require a dedicated read/write device to be installed in the computer, while others, such as USB flash drives, are plug-and-play with all the hardware required to read them built into the device, so only need a driver software to be installed in order to communicate with the device. Some removable media readers/drives are integrated into the computer case, while others are standalone devices that need to be additionally installed or connected.
A USB flash drive is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and usually weighs less than 30 g (1 oz). Since first offered for sale in late 2000, the storage capacities of USB drives range from 8 to 256 gigabytes (GB), 512 GB and 1 terabyte (TB). As of 2023, 2 TB flash drives were the largest currently in production. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to physically last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances.
In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", whereas the noun and adjective form is "backup". Backups can be used to recover data after its loss from data deletion or corruption, or to recover data from an earlier time. Backups provide a simple form of disaster recovery; however not all backup systems are able to reconstitute a computer system or other complex configuration such as a computer cluster, active directory server, or database server.
SpinRite is a computer program for scanning RAS Random Access Storage devices such as hard disks, reading and rewriting data using proprietary programming methods to resolve and retrieve data that is unreadable by DOS or Windows. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. The current version, 6.0, was released in 2004., with ongoing development open to the public at https://www.grc.com/dev/spinrite/
Data loss is an error condition in information systems in which information is destroyed by failures or neglect in storage, transmission, or processing. Information systems implement backup and disaster recovery equipment and processes to prevent data loss or restore lost data. Data loss can also occur if the physical medium containing the data is lost or stolen.
The Gutmann method is an algorithm for securely erasing the contents of computer hard disk drives, such as files. Devised by Peter Gutmann and Colin Plumb and presented in the paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory in July 1996, it involved writing a series of 35 patterns over the region to be erased.
In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).
In computing, a hybrid drive is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
IsoBuster is a data recovery computer program by Smart Projects, a Belgian company founded in 1995 by Peter Van Hove. As of version 3.0, it can recover data from damaged file systems or physically damaged disks including optical discs, hard disk drives, USB flash drives and solid-state disks. It has the ability to access "deleted" data on multisession optical discs, and allows users to access disc images and to extract files in the same way that they would from a ZIP archive. IsoBuster is also often used by law enforcement and data forensics experts.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
Recuva is an undeletion program for Windows, developed by Piriform Software. It is able to undelete files that have been marked as deleted; the operating system marks the areas of the disk in which they were stored as free space. Recuva can recover files deleted from internal and external hard disk drives, USB flash drives, memory cards, portable media players or all random-access storage mediums with a supported file system. Preview thumbnails of intact photos can be displayed in grid view mode and in the side bar.
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Secure Data Recovery Services provides data recovery and digital forensics services for a range of storage media, including laptop and desktop computer storage drives, HDD, SSD, RAID arrays, mobile devices, legacy storage systems, digital cameras, flash USB drives, and flash memory cards.