I've been reading this forums quite a bit recently, and in other forums as well. Mainly lurking, but when people want to get into this field, I've seen a lot of responses to the effect of you have to know hard drives inside and out, the different families, how they work, so on and so fourth.

My question is, where would one go to learn this information?

To find scrap drives and practice on them .

There's not anywhere. There are a few classes and trainings that are offered, but generally speaking they are a very poor/minimal/useless substitute for the real thing

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Get a low level job at a professional data recovery company and work you way up or buy a handful of drives and practice on them, and when you are done practicing, get some more drives and keep doing it. One thing you never want to do is put any future clients data in jeopardy because you do not know how to do something. There are DR professional ( and i use that lightly) that think DR is an easy money maker and essentially practice on clients drives, not having any clue that what they could be doing to the drive could make it unrecoverable.

I started at Ontrack as a shipping peon, then worked my way up to one of the clean room engineers. Even there they started me off with test drives for about 3 months.

Data recovery is not simple (well some is after years of experience) and it requires a lot of patience and learning. Even us professionals that have been doing it for over a decade, still are learning new things, since hard drives are ever changing.

Good Luck

I appreciate the replies from all of you. I am in my infancy of data recovery. I'm running a computer repair shop and I am applying what I learn here as well. When computers come in with check disk scans wanting to run or other signs of issues, I back up everything then do scans on the drives. My customers have gone through about a dozen drives in the last month.

So I do have plenty of failing and failed drives to play with. I just recently stopped writing DEAD on the labels in xl sharpie marker so I can read them for later.

As far as getting in to the field, I'm more of a hands on kind of person. When I got into graphic design a decade ago, I started with a $36,000 printer/cutter. I then got married and we had to move. Instead of starting over, I just sold the whole business and got into my computer repair & sales starting with 24 p4 towers for $800 on ebay. I fixed those up and sold them for $200 a piece which helped out with rent till repairs picked up.

Basically I've been researching DR 3 to 5 hours a night for the past 3 months and I'm going to jump in with a ddi and a pc-3000 and go from there. if we have to move again, I just change an address on my website and I'm good to go.


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All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T. E. Lawrence