Avid Pro Tools is an industry-standard tool for music production, sound editing, and mastering. It’s built to store important data — and recreating your Pro Tools sessions can be an arduous, time-consuming process.  Even if you’re able to restore lost...

While professional data recovery companies can handle virtually anything, the Sony PlayStation presents several significant challenges. Generally, if you’ve lost data from a PlayStation, you’ll need to use Sony’s utilities. Below, we’ll explain why, then provide some general tips for...

In the 1990s, many of us sat for hours in front of a screen with big, colored rectangles that slowly morphed into big, identical rectangles. Something like this:Defragmenting (or defragging) a hard drive was once part of standard computer...

If your internal hard disk drive (HDD) keeps disconnecting, you’ve got a potentially serious problem — and if the drive holds critically important data, we strongly recommend shutting down the affected system before taking any additional steps. In the vast...

If you need to sanitize (or, in less technical terms, wipe all data from) a hard drive, you can’t just delete it: You need to overwrite the file on a block level.  And if the file is especially sensitive, the...

If you’re determined to destroy your data, we’ve got good news: Contrary to popular misconception, it is possible to securely sanitize storage media in a way that prevents even the most advanced data recovery techniques from restoring your files.  To...

Hard disk drives (HDDs) are mechanical devices — and unless the laws of physics suddenly change, every hard drive will eventually fail. But while some of the issues that cause drive failures are out of your control, you can take...

Astronauts need to store a lot of data. Do they use hard drives, solid-state drives (SSD), or some other technology?  The answer: Hard drives can function in outer space, although solid-state storage may be a more appropriate choice for modern...

Occasionally, we like to address unusual questions on this blog. In other articles, we explained how high altitudes could cause hard drive failures and the chances of recovering data from a 10-year-old hard drive recovered from a landfill. Today,...

Hard drive shipments have fallen in recent years, and somewhat dramatically: By one estimate, the total number of shipped hard drives dropped by 33.5% from the first quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023.  For modern consumers, solid-state...