Mobile users within East Africa can now retrieve any lost data from the mobile devices thanks to new software capable of retrieving information lost for as far back as five years, from “all types” of handsets.
The service, unveiled yesterday by East Africa Data Handlers, is designed to recover lost data caused by system failures, formatting, power surges, accidentally deleted files and corrupted data due to viruses.
Android devices can recover data including SMS, MMS, email, passwords, browser bookmarks, cookies, contacts, blue tooth pairings, memos and location caches. The same can be said of iPhones and BlackBerry smartphones known to be impossible to recover data.
George Njoroge, East Africa Data Handlers’ managing director, said the project saw them spend well over KSh10 million (US$118,865) to develop the program. The minimum cost for data recovery services would be KSh6.500 (US$77).
He added that the technology is capable of recovering 100 percent of data from damaged mobile devices or phones that reset once the user forgets their passwords.
Njoroge said that lost data from the chips inside the handsets is recovered provided it can receive power. According to analysts, the major threat for smartphone use is that the handsets may be damaged or the data erased causing loss of data making the service a welcome relief.
He says the new service was prompted by the high increase of high-end mobile phones from “42 percent in 2008 to 72 percent in 2012, and since 87 percent of the world’s population now use the device.”
He further cited The Communications Commission of Kenya’s (CCK) estimated of 29.9 million mobile users saying most the data had been moved to the company’s mobile devices including emails, text messages, contacts, photos, and music.
East Africa Data Handlers was founded in 2005 as a disaster recovery company and currently has over 1 million customers across East African nations including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda.
The firm offers other services including physical, logical, user password and file system extraction, data extraction of existing, hidden and deleted data, iOS (iPad, iMac, iPhone) operating system, physical extraction, decoding and real time decryption, Android extraction and decoding, Blackberry decoding, GPS devices extraction and decoding and forensically sound environment solutions.
