There are some things that a client should never see, and the process of data recovery is definitely one of them. They are stressed and worried about the potential loss of their valuable data, and the consultant would prefer to get on with the job in a pressure-free environment. Ripping apart RAID drives and connecting them up for recovery is most definitely not pretty, and only serves to heighten the tension.
The array controller failed spectacularly, storing yesterday’s data on one drive and today’s data on the other. A USB/SATA caddy was hacked apart to do some emergency data recovery of 190Gb of film footage, the only copy after a very expensive few days of shooting.
The data wrangler on the job should have ensured that footage was in two places before wiping the on-camera storage. Thankfully in this instance it was possible to recover the data as the filesystems were intact.
