When encryption doesn't work

In my interview with Ontrack Data Recovery this week (see Recovery specialists bring data back from the dead), quite a bit hit the cutting room floor, including these three nuggets by Mike Burmeister, director of engineering for data recovery:

Encrption can be broken
I was surprised to learn that Ontrack regularly recovers encrypted data on systems where the user has lost the key. "There’s only a couple of technologies where we would run into a roadblock [such as] some of the new laptops that have passwords that are tied to the media and to the BIOS," says Burmeister. That raises the question: if they can do it, who else can?

On encrypted systems that are more difficult to crack, OnTrack also has a secret weapon. "Certain situations involve getting permission to get help from the manufacturer," he says.

Broken CDs still yield data
Ontrack can also reassemble and recover data from CD-ROM discs that have been broken into pieces. If you're using CDs for backups of sensitive data, it's probably best to shred them.

Tapes work. People fail
Among the tape problems Ontrack sees most often are those related to human errors, such as accidentally erased or formatted tapes.

"Formatting the wrong tapes is the most common [problem] by far. The other one is they back up over a tape that has information on it. The general thing is they back up the wrong data. We’ll get the tape in and they’ll say,  'The data I thought was on this tape is not on it.'"

While those failures can be attributed to confusion, another failure is the result of just plain laziness. "People run these backup processes and they’re not simple anymore. They run these large, complex tape libraries and they call that good enough. They don’t actually go through the process of verifying [the tape]," Burmeister says. The result: disaster strikes twice: once when the primary storage goes down and again when the restore fails.

For more on how the technical challenge of recovery have raised the stakes and what you can do to protect your data, see the story above.