Something All SSD Owners Should Know - No More Data Recovery

outlander on 19/06/2017 - 17:46

I've been messing around with computers for the last 15 years or so, nothing major but enough to know a little bit about everything. I would describe myself as an advanced user, able to deal with many problems as long as I have my good friend Dr Google to help me out. A big part of those problems has been data loss. Something would happen, a partition table would get corrupted, and I'd have to rush to recover it all. Although it's occasionally taken some ingenuity, I've always been able to get the critical stuff back

Until now.

SSD drives can not be recovered. At all. No combination of the usual software I've used in the past has managed to retrieve even a single file from before this drive was formatted.

This video gives an explanation for why this is.

The takehome from all this is that no one should have anything unreplaceable on an ssd without a backup copy elsewhere, because when its gone its gone. You can no longer rely on some last minute magic to save you if you make a mistake

Computing

Comments

  • captobvious on 19/06/2017 - 17:49
    +1

    So dont leave your favourite porn on the ssd then?

    • foxmulder on 19/06/2017 - 17:51
      +1

      So I guess that the very first thing to save in major malfunction of SSD :)

    • ProjectZero on 19/06/2017 - 17:54

      Where would you even? It's not like you need the fast read speeds. =P

    • outlander on 19/06/2017 - 18:08
      +1

      No, the porn got saved. Multiple times in fact. It was just the useless stuff I didn't back up - youknow, pictures of my niece's birth, video's of my dead grandparents, memories of my time with the only girl to love me, that kind of thing

      If anything, the lesson is save your stuff IN the porn folder, because you know that it's gonna find a way to stick around

      Porn, ah, ah.. finds a way

      • iridiumstem on 19/06/2017 - 18:11
        +2

        I don't think I will be able to explain why photos of my childhood, family, etc are in the porn folder.

        • 0FoxGiven on 19/06/2017 - 19:13

          Its called a "hard" drive for a reason I guess..

      • foxmulder on 19/06/2017 - 19:35

        I personally use MS SyncToy and calendar to schedule backup say everyweek to backup several folders into backup drive.

      • AdosHouse on 19/06/2017 - 20:50

        Why are you videoing your dead grandparents? Creepy much?

        Sorry just had too.

    • try2bhelpful on 19/06/2017 - 18:30

      You have to save that on the hard drive, don't you?

  • retiredfeline on 19/06/2017 - 17:51
    +1

    SSDs are great, but when they fail they tend to fail catastrophically. At least with HDs deterioration is gradual and you might be able to copy data off before all the blocks become inaccessible.

  • sachz on 19/06/2017 - 18:22
    1. use a NAS to store ur data centrally.
    2. run off-line backups of ur NAS which are refreshed when major changes occur (those 8tb seagate USB3 HDD's are great for this)
    3. keep ur SSD for Operating System mainly, and any 'data' u put on it should 'sync' to ur NAS in due time

    rinse & repeat.

  • elusive on 19/06/2017 - 18:26

    I've always taken the policy of having backups regardless of your primary storage media. I've had too many HDDs outright fail to leave it up to some dream of recovery. And even when readable they're slow in a degraded state and can give you corrupted data back.

    That said, HDDs do tend to leave more opportunity for last-second syncing/verification of changes since the last backup :)

  • Kiminoth on 19/06/2017 - 18:34

    Yeah, I learnt this semester at uni in my computer forensics unit about how difficult it is to recover data from SSD's due to the SSD's controller constantly organising data to be as efficient as possible.

  • Mrbean007 on 19/06/2017 - 18:38

    Have plenty of externals for back up together with my 2tb as for ssd only thing i have on them is the operating system and some programs together with the some games.
    If it goes will just grab them back from steam and operating system just reinstall would be a waste of a ssd to have data on them like movies/music/photo,s always have as much back up as possible for photos :)

  • altomic on 19/06/2017 - 18:49

    SSD for system. HDD for storage. and have a back up.

  • Clear on 19/06/2017 - 18:57

    I'm living on the edge. One of my backup servers is running off SSDs….

  • kywst on 19/06/2017 - 20:05

    Cloud storage is essential. It mitigates data loss by implementing physical and virtual redundancy. Use it for all your critical/sentimental data.

  • shaybisc on 19/06/2017 - 20:10

    So you can't recover data off an SSD. But, if what I read here is accurate, you can't remove data off an SSD. I am confused.

    "Secure Deletion on Solid-State Disks (SSDs), USB Flash Drives, and SD Cards Anchor link

    Unfortunately due to the way SSDs, USB flash drives, and SD cards work, it is difficult, if not impossible, to securely delete both individual files and free space. As a result your best bet in terms of protection is to use encryption—that way, even if the file is still on the disk, it will at least look like gibberish to anyone who gets ahold of it and can’t force you to decrypt it. At this point in time, we cannot provide a good general procedure that will definitely remove your data from an SSD. If you want to know why it’s so hard to delete data, read on.

    As we mentioned above, SSDs and USB flash drives use a technique called wear leveling. At a high level, wear leveling works as follows. The space on every disk is divided into blocks, kind of like the pages in a book. When a file is written to disk, it’s assigned to a certain block or set of blocks (pages). If you wanted to overwrite the file then all you would have to do is tell the disk to overwrite those blocks. But in SSDs and USB drives, erasing and re-writing the same block can wear it out. Each block can only be erased and rewritten a limited number of times before that block just won’t work anymore (the same way if you keep writing and erasing with a pencil and paper, eventually the paper might rip and be useless). To counteract this, SSDs and USB drives will try to make sure that the amount of times each block has been erased and rewritten is about the same, so that the drive will last as long as possible (thus the term wear leveling). As a side effect, sometimes instead of erasing and writing the block a file was originally stored on, the drive will instead leave that block alone, mark it as invalid, and just write the modified file to a different block. This is kind of like leaving the page in the book unchanged, writing the modified file on a different page, and then just updating the book’s table of contents to point to the new page. All of this occurs at a very low level in the electronics of the disk, so the operating system doesn’t even realize it’s happened. This means, however, that even if you try to overwrite a file, there’s no guarantee the drive will actually overwrite it—and that’s why secure deletion with SSDs is so much harder."

    https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-delete-your-data-securely-… 1

  • iforgotmysocks on 19/06/2017 - 21:39
    +1

    Thanks for the heads-up, I'll notify NASA

  • kiitos on 27/09/2017 - 23:14

    So what's the best/most reliable way to backup my dad of it contains my windows 10 installation? Is it to image it regularly? Out do most people just rely on reinstalling the OS and apps?

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