Talking about data recovery, I am a novice here; that was the first time I made contact with this field when I joined this company. At the very beginning, like other newcomers, I did feel this whole thing is mysterious and I did not think I can understand, I didn’t know where can I start..

But I must understand this technology as soon as possible.
Here are some experiences I want to share with other newcomers how to get started.
First, start from the easier phase of the entire data recovery flow. Don’t read some book like the File system or Raid. It is very hard for you as a beginner. Just use the tools like Data Compass, do some easy works for data recovery. This is the best and easiest way to get started.
Second, you must read the User Manual, this step is very important. Because when you use anything for the first time, the User Manual can help you to understand how to use these products.
Third, after you read the User Manual, you can have some idea for the products, and then you can read some case studies from the technology support engineer. These case studies are from the technology support engineer’s experience of the work. When you encounter the problem, it will be helpful for you to get a solution for the problem. This step is very very important.
Fourth, now you can connect the tools to the computer, and do some operations by yourself. For this step you can understand each function of the data recovery tools. Please do not do the work without the User Manual or on a customer drive with extremely important data, because you are not skilled enough, and if you do some wrong operations it will damage the drive. Be careful of this.
When you have done the three steps, congratulations, you have been a beginner. But don’t forget you must do more exercises.
For example, I will introduce how to learn and use the Data Compass.
This data recovery tools is very easy to use, first you need to read the User Manual for the Data Compass.
Here you can get some information from the User Manual, there are two control panels. First one the data compass control panel, the other one is the DCEXP control panel.
For the data compass control panel, you can know each button’s function. For example the “Enable read” button, from the User Manual you can know this function is to control the read permit ON/OFF to the patient drive. And the button “Enable write”, it is used to control the write permit to the patient drive; usually this should remain OFF since no one is willing to see the patient drive with data recovery requirement gets accidentally overwritten during the process because of unawareness of mistaken operation carried out.
And for the Knob configuration panel you can choose the HDD Latency, Retry times, Soft Reset Times, Hard Rest Times and Power Reset Times.
Here, the shadow disk control tab you can initialize shadow sis and enable the shadow disk.
The sector view and sector servo tab you can view and scan the sector.
For the “DCEXP”button is used to activate the DCEXP program; this allows reading, scanning, retrieval and extraction of files from the source drive.
The User Manual will teach us how to use the tools and software step by step, so please read and remember it.
After you read the User Manual you can connect the tool to the computer, and then try to use each button and understand there functions.
Then you can read some case studies from easy to hard - fisted you can read something like how to setup the ShadowDisk, and try to set it up by yourself; after that you can try to recovery the data with the ShadowDisk option enabled.
If you can do this easy case, then you can try to do some other difficult cases.
Data recovery is a field requires lots of experiences besides professional tools you need. If you want to learn and use the new technology, interest is important. Solving the problems step by step yourself and accumulating the experience from the daily work is something very funny.