Most mechanical hard drives have a small hole along with text that reads something like: “DO NOT COVER.” This is the hard drive’s breather hole, which equalizes internal pressure with the outside environment. Covering this hole can break your hard...

A developer’s simple request to clear a cache resulted in the total loss of a hard drive partition after Google’s experimental Antigravity AI agent executed the wrong command.  The incident, which is currently going semi-viral on Reddit, has an important...

Cryptocurrency scams rely on social engineering, technical deception, and urgency to steal assets that are designed to be difficult to recover. Even if you think that you’re too smart to get scammed, you’re susceptible. We’ve worked with hundreds of individuals...

Happy Thanksgiving from Datarecovery.com. While you are enjoying time with family and friends, the last thing you want to worry about is data loss — but we can say with certainty that some people will lose their files this weekend....

Bit rot (also known as data decay, data rot, or silent corruption) is the slow, gradual deterioration of a storage medium that causes individual bits of data to flip from 0 to 1 or vice versa. Bit rot occurs at...

If you’re hoping to store digital data on a standard hard disk drive (HDD) for a century, the short answer is no. While most hard drives have an expected lifespan of three to five years with regular use, even a...

Failing hard drives tend to make noises (though not always, as we’ve discussed in other articles). Solid-state drives are more subtle: They may not give any indication whatsoever that they’re near the end of their operational lifespans.  The most...

In simple terms, data corruption occurs when the data within a file or on a storage device is altered from its original state, rendering it unreadable or unusable. You’ve likely experienced this before: a photo that’s suddenly gray or distorted,...

Double-extortion ransomware is an attack where criminals both encrypt your files and steal (exfiltrate) your data. Triple-extortion simply adds a third layer of pressure such as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack or harassment to your clients or staff. It’s simply...

In 2024, about 59% of organizations were hit by ransomware, per a report from Sophos — and while that number is shocking, it’s actually slightly lower than the numbers for 2023.  For bad actors, ransomware is a lucrative business, and...