Incredible Data Recovery from Space Shuttle Columbia
Posted on 07 May 2008, at 3:18 pm, by Joel McLaughlin
Image courtesy of Scientific American
I saw this article on Scientific American’s website regarding the hard drive above. It was recovered from the space shuttle Columbia, and the data itself on the drive was also recovered; this data helped to solve a physics experiment. The drive was 99 percent recovered by OnTrack Data Recovery.
Now the image above has to be the worst I have EVER seen of a hard disk. This image and story should tell you to do one thing….YOUR BACKUPS!
Do you have similar stories? Do you have not so similar stories? Do I have to remind anyone what happened here??
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May 7th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Ha! I wish I would have at least had the opportunity to take “my” server’s hard drive to a recovery service. The other lesson here is that if you have a site, dedicated servers are the way to go. Along with backup, backup, BACKUP YOUR DATA!!
May 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I bet!
One thing I have been thinking about doing along this line is setting up Amazon’s S3 service and then writing some scripts to back stuff up. Just got to get the wife to agree to paying the fee. Might remind her about all those digital pics we have of our boy!
BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:58 am
When I worked in military subcontract work, I was writing software for the black boxxes (crash survivable memory units). They were all data, no voice.
Everything was stored in flash memory, rows and rows of flash chips (back when each chip was 64K or 128K.
We had a couple of incidents; the biggest was when a aircraft was doing some terrain following with blast shields down; and there was a crash.
They told us they couldn’t find any piece of the wreckage bigger than a person’s head! They found our module, about the size of a big hard drive. The corner was sheared off, and the seal to the unit was broken, but the entire thing was intact.
Our guys opened it, and found the casing of all the chips inside desinigrated, but the chips were still there, and connected to the circuit board.
We were able to get over 80% of recorded data from the module; and concluded that the terrain following computer went off line just before the crash.
It was cool to find enough data to determine what happened.
Mostly, the modules are used to determine what happened during a flight for maintenance purposes.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:22 am
That’s a crazy story! Thanks for sharing it.