If you’ve suffered data loss from an iPad or iPhone OS upgrade gone wrong, or you want to retrieve data you’ve deleted, one company’s mobile data device recovery service has just reported a 60% improvement in success rates.
Kroll Ontrack,
the company that can retrieve data from hard drives and SSDs damaged by water, heat or other catastrophes has announced dramatically better success in retrieving data from iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices.
Normally used as an expensive last resort to restore crucially important data that wasn’t backed up properly or in a timely enough manner, data recovery services have famously saved photos, business documents, PhD theses, financial files and more, saving untold amounts of time in recreating lost work or retrieving irreplaceable photos and videos.
Although Apple devices aren’t known for crashing or losing data, unlike the world of Windows PCs, Kroll nevertheless notes that iOS malfunctions can happen which can affect photos, videos and other data.
The Company has announced that its engineers “have developed a unique capability to recover data from the latest Apple mobile devices which exhibit a logical failure leaving the device stuck in ‘Recovery’ mode or ‘Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU)’ mode”.
Kroll Ontrack says these failures can “effectively trap encrypted data on the devices”, but those engineers have “devised a way to temporarily bypass the logical corruption to access the data using the consumer’s log-in information”, with this new method increasing “the chances of recovering encrypted data on the newest iPhones and iPads by up to 60 percent.”
Adrian Briscoe, APAC GM of Kroll Ontrack said: “Logical failures, such as OS upgrade malfunctions and corrupt software, can leave iPhone or iPad users with a device that is functional, but data that isn’t accessible. Add to that Apple’s latest generations of mobile devices with encrypted user data and data recovery success was slim because direct access to the encrypted data was not an option.”
Of course, celebrities who have deleted naughty photos from phones will want to make doubly sure they don’t lose those phones lest they be sent over to Kroll Ontrack’s data recovery centres – but that’s a different story.
Interestingly, Kroll Ontrack says it saw a “doubling in the number of Australian data recovery requests for iPhones and iPads in 2014 vs 2013”, showing big demand for data recovery services.
Despite the iPhone 5s and iPad Air being hardware encrypted, Kroll’s engineers say they “specifically developed the unique ability to repair the operating system to then access the data for all Apple mobile devices”, which when “combined with an already extensive ability to recover from non-hardware encrypted Apple devices, significantly increases the chances of recovering photos, videos, contacts, SMS, notes, calendar and other critical mobile device content”.
Kroll’s customers receive a diagnostic report “that shows the quality of recoverable files on the Apple device [so they know] exactly what data will be returned to them prior to committing to the cost of the recovery”, with the Company providing “both the raw files as well as a backup file that the individual can use to perform a full restore from iTunes to their Apple mobile device”, which also provides a point in time recovery file for future use.
Mr Briscoe added that: “Customers were coming to us for help recovering their encrypted data from their newer Apple devices because there are no commercially available solutions. We researched the issues and developed our own solution, as we often do. Our solution does not defeat or bypass the device’s encryption, but rather temporarily bypasses the logical corruption without “jail breaking” the device to access the data using the device and customer’s user access credentials.”
More information is available at the Kroll Ontrack’s Data Recovery
site here.
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