Data recovery specialists attempt to retrieve data from damaged hard drives.

They do this in a "Clean Room" - a dedicated space designed to give them the best possible chance of recovering data.

The air inside the room is filtered constantly to ensure it contains between 20 and 100 dust particles per cubic metre. A normal room has an average of 35 million dust particles. You know when a beam of light shines through your curtains and you can see a million dust particles dancing around? They're everywhere, all the time.

A fully equipped clean room can cost as much as £1 million to build!

Technicians also wear hazmat suits and walk on sticky mats which collect dust from their shoes.

Having a dust-free environment is crucial to maximising the chances of successful data recovery.  On a hard disk drive, the head - which reads and writes data in the form of 1's and 0's - hovers just a few nanometres above the platter. A single spec of dust in this gap can spell game over.

Could do with one of these just for fitting screen protectors tbh.

Post inspired by this video from Linus Tech Tips where he takes us on a tour of DriveSavers - a data recovery company in California.

Their museum exhibits some of their greatest success stories - everything from phones and laptops to photocopy machines and video recorders.

They've recovered data from devices damaged in house fires, mudslides, nuclear disasters and sunken cruise ships! They've rescued data for thousands of people, including Adam Sandler, Harrison Ford, and Khloe Kardashian.

It's important work: DriveSavers have recovered photographic evidence for murder cases, and even 12 episodes of The Simpsons that had been deleted by mistake!🙌

Remarkable work 👏