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Six Years of Research Almost Lost to Antarctica’s Harsh Tundra

Case Study: UPENN Stars and Galaxies Research Project

Client :
BLAST, UPENN

Type d'appareil :
200GB Hard Drive

Tournez autour du pot :
2 Business Days*

Profession :
Scientist

Localisation :
Antarctique

Six Years of Research Almost Lost to Antarctica’s Harsh Tundra

When the BLAST parachute became tangled during landing, it dragged the space telescope and hard drive 120 miles over the icy tundra destroying the equipment and its data.

Situation de perte de données

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania seeking answers to some of the most important questions regarding the formation and evolution of stars, galaxies, and star clusters, set forth with several other institutions on a six-year project called BLAST (Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope). During the second flight for BLAST launched from a remote station in Antarctica, an unmanned balloon carrying the most powerful space telescope of its kind floated into the stratosphere at altitudes of 120,000 feet and ultimately crashed on the edge of an icy ravine on January 1, 2007.

The 200GB IDE hard drive onboard BLAST that recorded all the new data was salvaged by a rescue team, but once back in the lab it did not boot up. A small amount of data was streamed back to the researchers during the flight, but the bulk of the information (about 160GB of binary files) was lost. The scientists turned to DriveSavers to recover the data and help them unlock their new discoveries.

Six years of work would have gone down the tubes, not only would the experiment have been destroyed, we would’ve lost invaluable data about early galaxies in their formation stages between 7-10 billion years ago or so. Thanks to DriveSavers, we can analyze the data and share our discoveries with the rest of the world.
– University of Pennsylvania scientist Mark Devlin

Solution de récupération de données

The badly damaged drive was delivered to our Certified ISO Class 5 Cleanroom, a dust-free environment containing highly filtered air that is 10,000 times cleaner than normal office air. DriveSavers cleanroom engineers opened the drive’s casing, assessed the physical damage, and repaired the mechanics of the drive to gain access to and make a clean image of the data. Using years of experience combined with proprietary software and the most advanced data recovery techniques, the logical engineering team rebuilt the entire data set to perfection.

Résumé

DriveSavers is the most progressive, successful data recovery company in the world. Since 1985, we have successfully recovered data from hundreds of thousands of hard drives and other storage media that have been exposed to extreme cold weather, wet snow, power surges, mechanically failed, been physically damaged, infected by viruses or worse. Our engineers work closely with major drive manufacturers to keep pace with changing data storage technology and have developed data recovery tools and techniques so advanced we consistently rescue data others deem lost forever.

*DriveSavers Standard Turnaround times are 1-2 Business days, Economy 5-7 Business days, and Priority 24/7 service – on occasion, unique substances require more time and are approved by the customer.

Mike Cobb, directeur de l'ingénierie et RSSI
En tant que directeur de l'ingénierie, Mike Cobb gère les opérations quotidiennes du département d'ingénierie, y compris les récupérations physiques et logiques des supports rotatifs, des disques SSD, des dispositifs intelligents et des supports flash. Il supervise également les efforts de R&D pour les technologies de stockage passées, présentes et futures. Mike encourage la croissance et s'assure que chaque département et ses ingénieurs continuent d'acquérir des connaissances dans leur domaine. Chaque ingénieur de DriveSavers a été formé pour s'assurer que la récupération complète et réussie des données est leur priorité absolue.

En tant que responsable de la sécurité de l'information (CISO), Mike supervise la cybersécurité chez DriveSavers, y compris le maintien et la mise à jour des certifications de sécurité telles que la conformité SOC 2 Type II, la coordination de la politique de sécurité de l'entreprise et la formation des employés en matière de cybersécurité.

Mike a rejoint DriveSavers en 1994 et est titulaire d'une licence en informatique de l'Université de Californie, Riverside.

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