ActionFront Announces SignalTrace Technology; Breakthrough Research Sets New Milestone for Data Recovery Industry; Forensic and Intelligence Communities Showing Interest
ActionFront Data Recovery Labs, a leader in resolving business-critical data loss, today announced SignalTrace(TM) technology. This technological breakthrough is designed to recover data from media that is so badly damaged it cannot be recovered by any current means.
SignalTrace(TM) is being introduced on the exhibit floor of the 2004 NASA/IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST04). A review of SignalTrace(TM) technology is being presented at the work-in-progress session of MSST04 by Charles H. Sobey, Chief Scientist of ChannelScience (www.channelscience.com ), who assisted with the development of SignalTrace(TM).
White Paper Provides Comprehensive Background
In conjunction with the conference demonstration, ActionFront is releasing a technical white paper entitled “Recovering Unrecoverable Data – The Need for Drive-Independent Data Recovery.” (Available at www.actionfront.com )
In the paper, commissioned by ActionFront, Mr. Sobey, an internationally respected authority of hard disk drive technology and data detection provides a rare insight into current data recovery methods, explains the reasons some media are unrecoverable, and identifies the need for a new class of drive-independent data recovery techniques. The paper then proceeds to describe ActionFront’s SignalTrace(TM) technology in some detail.
The white paper also calls for an independent data recovery trade association to be formed to certify data recovery companies and to verify claims of extraordinary data recovery capabilities.
Mr. Sobey points out that, “This is an industry that provides vital services that any of us may need at some point, but it is completely without benchmarks or standards. Currently there is no way to know if a data recovery company can do what they claim, or if they will instead make the chances of recovering your data worse.” Indeed, the websites of most hard disk drive manufacturers simply provide a Google(R) search link for “data recovery” instead of recommending a “certified” or “approved” data recovery company. The search currently returns over 1.5 million hits.
Until an independent trade association is formed, Mr. Sobey calls for the best data recovery companies to lead the industry by example and submit their claims of extraordinary data recovery capabilities to a respected, peer-reviewed technical journal for evaluation and publication.
Nick Majors, President of ActionFront, highlights these points saying “Despite the urban myth that data recovery companies have ‘magic machines’ for retrieving data from crashed hard-drives, the most sophisticated, commercially successful recovery techniques today actually consist of careful part-replacement in a cleanroom environment. This process yields average recovery success rates below 60% for physically damaged drives, and in too many cases the data simply cannot be recovered by any known commercial or scientific method. As the data density of the newer ‘hyper-tuned’ hard disk drives continues to increase, ‘drive-independent’ data recovery methods are needed to read current and future models of damaged drives.”
SignalTrace(TM) Provides Extraordinary Recovery Solution
Mr. Sobey states, “SignalTrace(TM) technology, which ActionFront Data Recovery Labs is unveiling here, has the capabilities needed for commercially viable recovery of data that is unrecoverable using traditional part-replacement. SignalTrace(TM) replaces the exacting, optimized signal processing and positioning functions of ‘hyper-tuned’ disk drives with custom hardware, software, and algorithms to precisely locate particular sectors of data and recover each user bit individually – independent of the drive’s specific hardware. SignalTrace(TM) is the only solution known to date that can recover user data from modern previously un-recoverable drives.”
He continues adding, “This is an important development for data recovery in general, but it is crucial for the data forensics, intelligence, and counter-terrorism specialists who analyze computer systems seized from criminals or enemies that have damaged their systems in order to conceal evidence.”
Underscoring the significance of this milestone for the data recovery industry, ActionFront has accepted the call for independent verification of this capability. Nick Majors states, “ActionFront’s research team will submit the technical details of SignalTrace(TM) to a refereed technical journal to provide independent verification of this unique and important breakthrough.”
About ActionFront
ActionFront is a leading company recovering lost information from downed or inaccessible computers, backups, servers and corrupted or deleted file sets. Serving thousands of personal and business customers each year since 1989, lost data is retrieved from all types of digital media including hard drives, tape cartridges, photo cards, network servers, (RAID, NAS, SAN), tape autoloaders and optical jukeboxes and from corrupted file sets in software platforms such as SQL, Oracle and Exchange Server. ActionFront is ISO 9001: 2000 certified and serves customers from locations in Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, Santa Clara, Toronto and Tokyo. For more information please visit www.actionfront.com .
About Charles Sobey
Charles Sobey, Chief Scientist of ChannelScience (www.channelscience.com ) has worked in the data detection and data storage industries for two decades and is a senior member of the IEEE. His projects have included military communication systems, medical image processing systems, design and manufacture of magnetic recording heads, and modeling and development of detection methods, such as those found in PRML read channels for data storage devices.
Chuck’s technical interests include nanotechnology-based data storage methods, integrating hard disk drives into non-traditional applications, evaluation of new technologies for investment or acquisition, physiological monitoring, and applying advanced adaptive data detection techniques to chemical and biological warfare sensors for homeland security. Chuck has five issued US patents and several published papers and articles. He has conducted data detection and disk drive technology seminars around the world.
