Hard-disk rehab sees growth | Bangkok Post: tech

DATA RECOVERY

Inter Data Recovery, the country's largest data recovery service provider, expects a 30% surge in service demand this month because of the floods.

Inter Data technicians at work in the laboratory trying to recover data from damaged hard-disk drives, which are pictured at right.

Driving demand for data recovery service are companies in the seven flood-hit industrial estates, especially the past two weeks, said Pairoj Tea-mangkornpan, the founder of Inter Data Recovery.

The company says it can achieve up to an 80% data recovery success rate if customers send their drives to it for the initial recovery attempt. But the success rate plunges to 20% if other data recovery providers already failed in their attempts.

"The demand surge will only last one to two months," Mr Pairoj admitted.

For every 100 computers, the hard disks in five to six could lose their data, in particular for notebooks. But only 0.1% of those who lose data use a data recovery service because of its high cost. Data recovery ranges from 8,000 to 10,000 baht, and Thailand averages 1,500 to 3,000 cases per month.

Mr Pairoj said the hard-disk recovery business was still a niche market in Thailand, and even in Singapore, Japan and the United States, where service charges are much higher than in Thailand.

Unlike small computer repair shops that use software tools to retrieve data, Inter's laboratory uses a reverse engineering hardware system.

He advised companies with computers submerged in floodwater to neither remove the hard-disk drive nor open the computer as it would damage other electronic components.

It is important that users not open their hard disk or clean or dry it by themselves because it might destroy data on the drive. Instead, wrap it in a plastic bag and seal it before sending it to a recovery service.

He admitted cloud computing, which enables users to store data online, might reduce the use of hard drives. But limited broadband network capacity limits users from uploading large files or data.