Encrypted Hard Drive Recovery

Data encryption is a great innovation when extremely important and sensitive data, such as HIPAA-protected medical records, must be kept confidential. However, it can also be a curse. If the password is lost or forgotten, the data on an encrypted hard drive is gone . . . forever. No amount of begging or yelling at the drive will give access to data. The encryption program used doesn’t care whether your intentions are good or bad. If you don’t have the password, you don’t get your data. Period. Even when malware maliciously encrypts data, the password is the only way to get access to data. Yet another reason to make sure data is backed up in a separate location.

But what happens when all necessary decryption credentials are known and the encrypted drive fails or data is seen without access? To Fusion Data Recovery engineers it is just like any other failed drive until the step where encryption is undone. It is an added step that is easily handled by our experienced engineers and our state-of-the-art equipment.

Types of Encryption

Full Drive Encryption

This means the entire drive is encrypted, not just specific files. In other words, if the computer is opened up and the hard drive is taken out, all the contents of that physical hard drive are encrypted. The drive acts like a vault with a combination lock. If any documents are placed in the safe and the door is closed, the documents are protected. The only way to get those documents back is to know the combination. Likewise, any files that are saved on a computer or digital device with full drive encryption will be encrypted automatically,. However, if you decide to e-mail that same file to someone else, it will not be encrypted anymore; just like taking a document out of a safe means that document is now not secure. FileVault 2 for Mac and BitLocker for Windows are examples of full drive encryption.

File Level Encryption

File encryption is the encryption of specific files only. So, if there are only two documents on a computer, one file can be encrypted while the other is not. Unlike full drive encryption, a choice must be made about what to encrypt. There are managed data encryption service providers that allow the use of policies to automate the process. For example, your Excel files will be encrypted automatically but not any jpegs. Unlike full drive encryption, since the actual file is encrypted, passing around the files (via e-mail or otherwise) will still ensure the security of those files. The only analogy is when a message is ciphered and the only way to decipher that message is to know how. VeraCrypt and 7-Zip are examples of file level encryption.