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Data Safety Tips for the Wildfire Season

DriveSavers published a handful of articles from past fire seasons that remain relevant today.

Fire-damaged devices: recoverable or not?

The Northern California fires of 2017 taught us some lessons about the different effects that a wildfire has on data storage devices as opposed to the average house fire. Data recovery for these devices requires different techniques and, sometimes, a hard drive or other device that was in a wildfire is not recoverable at all.
This article explores the effects of different types of fire on data storage devices and shares some tell-tale signs that the data from a device may or may not be recoverable.

Read the article.

What to do with your fire-damaged device

Many customers don’t understand how much data can be recovered, even from a hard drive, that has been in a fire. Over the past thirty-fire years, DriveSavers has recovered data from thousands of fire-damaged devices. Each type of data storage device comes with its own challenges, but we can overcome most of them.

This article explains in depth what happens inside a data storage device when it is in a fire and what needs to be done in order to successfully recover data. Devices examined include solid state drives (SSD), smartphones, tablets, camera cards, SD and micro-SD cards.

Read the article.

One of the lucky ones

Mike Cobb, DriveSavers Director of Engineering, lost his home in the Sonoma County fire last October 2017. He uses personal tragedy to help explain why we should all be protecting our business and personal information from potential loss, and how to do just that.

Read the article.

Disaster preparedness data safety tips

Keeping your data safe and out of harm’s way can make all the difference when recovering from a disaster. Accounting and project files can get a business back up and running. Family photos and videos can help bring back laughter and a sense of normalcy at home.

This article is not specific to fire; however, it contains some great tips for general disaster preparedness and data protection.

Read the article.

Mike Cobb, Director of Engineering and CISO
As Director of Engineering, Mike Cobb manages the day-to-day operations of the Engineering Department, including the physical and logical recoveries of rotational media, SSDs, smart devices and flash media. He also oversees the R&D efforts for past, present, and future storage technologies. Mike encourages growth and ensures that each of the departments and their engineers continues to gain knowledge in their field. Each DriveSavers engineer has been trained to ensure the successful and complete recovery of data is their top priority.

As Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Mike oversees cybersecurity at DriveSavers, including maintaining and updating security certifications such as SOC 2 Type II compliance, coordinating company security policy, and employee cybersecurity education.

Mike joined DriveSavers in 1994 and has a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside.

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