Ontario data recovery Archives - Memofix's Data Recovery Blog

Join us at the Canadian Imaging Conference and Trade Show

April 17, 2026

Memofix Data Recovery Services will be an exhibitor at the upcoming 2015 Canadian Imaging Conference and Trade Show in Niagara Falls, Ontario on April 26th and 27th. Please feel free to be our guest at this event by printing and presenting the Trade Show Pass shown below.

This trade show is put on by the PPOC or Professional Photographers of Canada and is part of a 4 day conference aimed at the professional photographer and imaging professional. The conference offers various educational seminars hosted by 19 well respected industry experts and is aimed at improving your artistic and technical imaging skills.

Memofix Data Recovery Services has extensive experience recovering data for professional photographers and videographers. We routinely recover data from all types of camera memory cards, as well as external hard drives, NAS devices, LTO tape and RAID storage devices. If you’ve lost your valuable photos or video, we can help.

WARNING - WARNING - WARNING

February 2, 2026

In my last blog I recounted how we managed to recover the data from a multiple hard drive RAID array AFTER two different European data recovery companies had failed. In that situation, we were the white knight, coming in to save the data where others had failed. But recently, we were painted as the villain for performing similar data recovery magic right here in Toronto. In fact, the title of this blog came from our 1^st ever negative Google review as a result of this recent case.

To summarize, we received a 2.5” Western Digital WD hard drive for data recovery. The particular model drive sent in, has a USB3 interface built onto its PCB (printed circuit board) and it does not have typical SATA connections. From experience, we have found that data recovery imaging utilities (both in-house written and commercial) work terribly with USB interfaced hard drives. As a result, we don’t attempt to access or image USB3 type WD drives using their native USB PCB. Instead, we have learned how to convert a particular standard WD SATA PCB to work with these native USB drives.

So when we received this case, we immediately converted one of SATA PCBs to work with this drive. The conversion process required us to remove one small 8 pin programmable chip from the client’s original USB3 PCB and transfer it onto our SATA PCB. Once we did this, we were able to evaluate the drive fully and concluded that the drive had bad heads and likely minor disk damage. We contacted the client and quoted them $1300, which they declined. We transferred the client’s 8 pin chip back to their original PCB and returned the drive to the client.

The client then took it to another data recovery company who claimed it was unrecoverable because we had damaged the PCB and furthermore we left solder paste around the 8 pin chip and were thus “VERY AMATEURISH”. Ok we forgot some totally inconsequential solder paste on the PCB. But we never once applied power to the PCB so the claim we damaged it seemed unfounded. Of course there was a chance we damaged the small 8 pin chip so we suggested the client bring it back to us. They did; we removed the chip and verified it’s functionality using a chip reader. While it was here, we re-established the fact that we could still recover the data, but again the client did not want to pay us anything and left with their drive intact but with no solder paste residue to complain about.

Apparently, the client then went to KROLL ONTRACK, “the industry leader and the largest data recovery provider in Canada and in the world”. The client claims they also declared the drive unrecoverable due to the same “damaged” PCB.

The client then came back to us, and we again re-iterated that we had not damaged anything, and we could still recover the data for him. In fact, just to keep our good guy image alive, we offered to reduce the cost by $300. At 1^st the client accepted thinking we offered the recovery at $300. But when he realized we weren’t giving it away and still required $1000 to complete the recovery he declined and created his mean spirited Google complaint.

Whether this client was trying to get a free recovery or not, I don’t know, or care, but in the end I am aghast that 2 other professional data recovery companies in Toronto cannot recover the data from a situation where we regularly do.

It helps to realize, that the world wide data recovery industry has no standards, no way of knowing a company’s competency, or a company’s integrity. There are lots of bad guys waiting to take your money for very little in return and many posers issuing inaccurate statements about what is recoverable and what is not. The damage they can cause is inexcusable. I have heard it said that something like 70% of small companies that lose their data permanently are out of business within 6 months. Don’t be one of them!

If your data is important, don’t believe the 1^st “It’s UNRECOVERABLE” that you hear. Data recovery companies and technicians are not created equal. Please seek a 2^nd or 3^rd or 4^th opinion, or maybe you should just come to Memofix Data Recovery Services first.

Hard Drive ECC Errors!

January 16, 2026

Recovering data, whether it’s important engineering data for a Hydro Electric company or the family pictures for a young family, is very rewarding on a personal level. Of course there is the enjoyment of helping someone in need. But the real reward for a good data recovery technician comes from the satisfaction of solving problems others can’t.

However, not all data recovery cases are solvable and that’s hard for my techs and our clients to hear. One of the most frustrating data recovery scenarios involves uncorrectable read errors. We see a lot of these cases.

In this typical scenario we receive a small 2.5” laptop hard drive for data recovery. We evaluate the hard drive and deem it functional enough to start creating a sector by sector image. But as we image off the drive it encounters more and more Error Check & Correction or ECC errors; to the point that there is at least one unreadable sector for every 5000 sectors we read. When a disk drive encounters a read error it will attempt to read the same sector at least 10 times. This slows the imaging process to a crawl and as a result it’s not uncommon for the imaging to take months to complete. Besides the time delay, the image is also riddled with unreadable sectors located randomly across the entire data area and in close proximity to each other, making it difficult to find large contiguous blocks of error free data. This means many larger files may be damaged beyond being use-able and often the majority of the good data will be restricted to smaller sized files. Depending on the size of the files the client needs, this may be acceptable or not.

What is most frustrating is the fact that there is little that can be done. These errors are the result of data not being written properly to the drive in the first place. Bad in equals bad out!

It helps to understand where these errors are triggered. When a hard drive reads a sector of data, it also reads a 50 byte ECC code that resides just after the real data. When the data was 1^st written to the sector it ran a sophisticated algorithm on the 512 bytes of sector data and this resulted in a unique ECC code which can only be replicated by reading the exact same data. When a sector is read later, the drive attempts to validate the data by running the same algorithm on the data and comparing it to the previously stored ECC code. If the code doesn’t match, the disk drive produces an error code and prevents the transfer of the data. The hard drive will normally attempt to re-read the data up to 10 times as it tries to match the ECC code and this process slows the drive down considerably.

With our hard drive expertise we are able to disable the retries and other housekeeping chores that slow the drive down. But even with these shortcuts, it is not uncommon for hard drives with this problem to take weeks or even 2-3 months to completely read off every readable sector, especially if the drive is 1TB or larger.

We do have the capability to use special read commands to bypass the ECC error checking but the data is usually garbage or at the very least, it can never be trusted 100%. We will do this for a few key sectors of data if the situation warrants it.

So what cause these ECC errors to proliferate? ECC errors can be the result of many different causes.

If a weak head is having problems writing data, ECC errors can often be created. The head appears to be stable when it writes the data and even passes the ECC check initially. But when it attempts to read the same sector later the ECC check fails and the request is aborted.

lf a hard drive is running under extreme heat conditions, for example if a laptop gets extremely hot while you are working from home by the swimming pool, the hard drive which is a mechanical device made of many sorts of metals will expand. Writing data while the drive is in this state may cause problems later when trying to read the drive in a cooled down state as the positioning will affected ever so slightly. This shouldn’t normally cause problems but extremes of operability are always unpredictable.

BUT the number one reason for the proliferation of ECC errors in our opinion is a bad memory chip whether on the hard drive or more likely inside the desktop or laptop.

If your storage device is riddled in read errors, we can help and are usually successful in recovering the majority of a user’s data. Costs for these types of cases are typically in the $400-700 range depending on the severity of the errors and the capacity of your hard drive. Please give us a call today to discuss your data loss situation.

Data Recovery & Encryption, foe or friend ?

September 26, 2026

Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

To most of us, the word “encryption” conjures up images of spies and secret disks containing information that must be guarded at all costs. Few of us realize that we all rely on and use encryption almost every day in our normal lives. Whether making a cell call, sending an email, buying something with your debit card, or accessing the web wirelessly, we are using and being protected by this not so simple process.

What is encryption? Encryption is the process used to transform and disguise data so that it is unreadable or undecipherable to anyone without a pre-determined secret code or password. Basically, the data to be encrypted is sent through an elaborate algorithm using the secret code or password to scramble the data into indistinguishable rubbish.

Please note, that password protection is NOT encryption. Password protection “may” prevent access to the data, but it does not alter the actual data. Password protection can be easily bypassed.

Encryption has also become common place for protecting data on computer based storage device like hard drives and USB flash sticks. Encryption can be used to protect an entire volume, a folder or even a single file. There are several distinct implementations available:

SOFTWARE, Users can buy or use free encryption programs that make it possible to encrypt files, folders or even their entire hard drive or flash device using software routines to intercept and modify the data on the fly. The entire encrypting and decrypting process is handled by your computer’s CPU or processor. Popular examples include SafeGuard, SecureDoc, PGP, TrueCrypt and Safeboot. Starting with XP Professional, Microsoft includes a built in folder and file encryption feature called Encrypting File System or EFS for short. Software encryption methods are popular as they are inexpensive and can be implemented on any existing storage device. However, they are generally much slower, typically 20% slower than hardware based methods.
HARDWARE, There are external hard drive devices that use a standard hard drive connected through a “hardware based” encryption interface board. In many cases this encryption process is performed without the user even being aware. Many Western Digital external boxes use this method allowing 100% data protection if the drive is ever removed from the enclosure and its encrypting interface board. Hardware techniques are considerably faster than software methods.
SELF ENCRYPTING, Users can now buy hard drives and SSDs that utilize on-board hardware to encrypt and decrypt the data on the fly. These devices encrypt the entire contents of a storage device and are referred to as SEDs or self-encrypting devices or drives. These drives carry a premium price tag but are the ultimate in safety and speed. Some hard drive manufactures such as Seagate may also refer to this self-encrypting as FDE or Fixed Disk Encryption.

Why use encryption? Most of us have heard a story or two about personal financial data falling into the wrong hands due to a corporate laptop being stolen or lost. Or the often recreated news story about reporters picking computers out of the trash and finding “valuable” info left abandoned. Yes it does happen, as someone who regularly buys previously used hard drives can attest. But just how many of us actually have super sensitive data on our computers in the first place? If you are one of the few that must keep your data from prying eyes, then by all means encrypt away. But if you don’t need to … DON’T!

Besides the potential loss in performance, there are several other reasons not to use encryption.

LOSS OF PASSWORD OR KEYFILE: If you can’t remember the password or can’t find the keyfile you made 3 years ago, you will NOT get your data back, period. While there are numerous recovery techniques for decrypting or accessing encrypted volumes, they all require some form of a username/password combo or a special key file created by the encryption software.
OPERATING SYSTEM FAILURE: If an encrypted drive’s operating system becomes corrupted, perhaps due to a simple virus and the drive is no longer bootable or accessible, there is no easy way to repair the file system and regain access. To resolve the issue you must first decrypt the entire volume. Again you will need a user/password or keyfile (and specialized programs) to perform such an operation. Once the volume is decrypted, the file system damage can then be repaired using the file system’s own repair utilities, i.e. chkdsk.exe
READ ERRORS: Over time storage device can easily develop read errors and if these read errors affect the operating system files or an area used to store pertinent encryption parameters, it can become impossible to access your data. As above, complicated procedures will be required to decrypt the volume and access the data. A single read error can stop everything.

Is encryption breakable? Theoretically, with enough computing power and enough time, any encryption scheme can be broken. But if the process takes a thousand years, the value of the data may be very limited. And fortunately the increase in computing power to break the key is easily outstripped by the exponential increase in difficulty by adding an additional bit to the encryption key. Presently, most credit card companies recommend transactions using 128 bit encryption keys. 128 bits keys are considered by the experts to be safe until about 2030 although some recommend 256 bit keys due to the advent of the “quantum computer” where theoretically the difficulty may be halved.

There are 2 basic ways of breaking encryption. The hacker either breaks the password by guessing the password or the hacker uses crypto analysis to guess the message based on the natural frequency and composition of the characters in a given language. To guess a password is often very easy as people tend to use real words and they are often chosen from an individual’s personal life or interests. Even brute force using a pre-created word list is often successful. To be sure your password can’t be compromised in your lifetime it has been recommended that your password should be at least 20 random characters. Of course few of us can remember such a long sequence.

In the real world, getting around the encryption is often much easier than either of these methods. Keyboard recorders are simple to install devices that can be used to record all the keystrokes of a user including their passwords. Or perhaps a hidden camera could provide the same results. Another technique can be utilized if a user leaves their computer unattended, as the contents of RAM memory are not encrypted and there are ways to dump the RAM contents and retrieve a password. Additionally, a group of researchers/hackers recently discovered that the contents of RAM memory do not disappear as soon as the power is removed. In fact if the RAM chips can be kept cool, the data may be retained for 10 minutes or longer. Theoretically reading the RAM contents could be possible even if the power is turned off. But this isn’t really so much about breaking the password as it is about stealing the password.

Can Memofix recover your encrypted data? Usually YES, but we need your keyfile or username/password combo … PERIOD. If we could recover your encrypted data without these credentials then what would be the point of using encryption in the first place.

We regularly recover data encrypted with PPG, Safeboot, SafeGuard, SecureDoc, EFS and most other software encryption programs. We are also very successful recovering hardware encrypted hard drives where the encryption is performed by an interface board separate from the storage device. i.e. the popular Western Digital My Book.

However, SEDs or Self Encrypting Devices present a real problem. It is estimated that by 2017 over 80% of all hard drives and all SSD or Solid State Drives will be SED or self-encrypting devices. There are NO decryption methods available for these SEDs and if consumers and businesses are to adopt these new SEDs, this concern must be addressed by the manufacturers.

Encryption is here to stay whether you need it or not. If you do choose to encrypt your data, we suggest you always create a key file and store it in a secure location. Additionally, record all usernames and passwords in a secure location and until the SED manufactures create a solution for authorized decrypting, we suggest you steer clear of their products or be sure to regularly backup.

As always, when things don’t quite go as planned remember your friends at Memofix https://www.memofixdatarecovery.com/ are always willing to help!