Enjoy the new episode! Sooo much love and work was poured into this so I hope you love it! 🔔And subscribe and stay tuned because on JUNE 29 I'm debunking the Chillwell scam! That's right! I'm revisiting those horrible "Portable AC" units. It's been a while. 😈 June 29!
Chilly Willy (well) is a scam? Holy shit, I'm marking the 29th on my calendar. I wanna see his fall from grace and finally get exposed as not being a cartoon penguin.
Yep. I got burned by a cheap toy that looked like it’d make a great gift. It wasn’t great. It looked nothing like the item in the ad. Lesson learned. Months later, my husband handed me a little thumb drive that he had bought online. He said it was a 2 TB drive. I knew better because I watch Krazy Ken! We plugged it into an old laptop - I wasn’t sticking that thing into a computer I actually use - and transferred about 100 GB of files to it as a test. It looked like it worked, but I made my husband try to open some files. A few opened, but most didn’t. I explained that the little drive was probably a 32 or 64 GB drive at most, any any data that exceeded that amount was just overwritten on the data already written. That was a more expensive lesson at about $120 for the two drives he bought. No more purchases from ads on social media in this household.
Is it bad I paid $22 for one 4 years ago? It's a clamshell like dock so it encapsulates the drive I plug in. It's USB 3.0 and takes 3½" and 2½" HDDs and SSDs. I figure it's better than a ribbon cable doohickey with an adapter hardwired onto it.
Well, to be fair, if you did exactly what that ad showed them doing with the lighter, you'd be able to use the Zilkee with it. I don't know WHY you would hold a BIC one foot under an HDD for one second, but Zilkee could recover it. Maybe it was Old Man Ken thinking that it was like a stuck jar and if you heat it up, it's easier to get the contents out 😂
I hate that these scam products are trying to target non-techy customers with the promise of an easy solution to their problem. And WHAPAM, they get screwed by their naïvity.
I remember a few months back when there was a scam ad about "how to recover data from water damaged drive" and when clicked, it redirects to a "Wondershare Recovery Data" app that forces you to buy their subscription (It was also explained by Louis Rosmann in his video: "Wondershare is a garbage company") Kinda similar to this type of scam
@@sihamhamda47 My “favourite” is the unusable free versions of various Windows-only partitioning programs like EaseUS Partition Master and AOMEI Partition Assistant. They look like they’re the same program and the free version is literally unable to handle partitioning, so that is basically a mockup of the paid, functioning program. Thank God, EaseUS ditched that handicapped free version for one that can actually do basic partitioning, like what a free version of a commercial partitioning tool needs to do… But AOMEI still has an unusable free version.
I accidentally firmware-locked myself out of my MacBook Pro last year. I was doing some maintenance on the battery which required me to disconnect the battery connector. Little did I know, doing so would trigger the firmware lock, which I put on the laptop years ago and had completely forgotten. I had to take it to an Apple store to have them bypass and remove the firmware lock. There was a high chance that all of my data would be corrupted, but thankfully all of my data was retrieved safely! After that, I learned two things: 1) always make backups of your data, and 2) always keep a record of your passwords (or, don't put a firmware lock on a computer in the first place).
The only time I've seen the Mac firmware lock used was on the school library PCs which were all really iMacs (and this was before the coloured ones, if they had those they probably would've bought only silver ones). My guess is that they locked it in order to prevent students from getting into the recovery partition, because I know the school's IT people would get real salty if they saw anyone installing and running their own apps in the home folders on the student accounts (which were all local accounts as the MOE had Active Directory for Windows but not Open Directory for macOS and Linux-based desktop OSes). Edit: The thing about students running their own apps only worked if it was a .app file rather than a .pkg or .mpkg file.
...and 3; If you make any important settings changes, record them in a log book or like I do, in the spare pages at the back of my computers installation manual)
As someone who repairs laptops and PC's for a living I have lost count of the times people have come to me for data recovery and I must have said "back up your data" a million times over a 20 year period. I even bought a load of cheap USB2 memory sticks that I gave to customers for free, they were big enough at 8GB to back up your pictures, which is the most common thing people lose in my experience, but even with a FREE stick most people still didn't back up their data. The back up process is even easier nowadays with cloud storage being thrown at you by every tech company going and most laptops/PC's have 2 drives in them making copying a folder so easy it's laughable but people still won't back up their data!!!!!
I know, this drives me crazy too... I've even talked to people who are at least aware they're suffering hard drive problems (odd noises, extremely poor performance, etc., signs of a mechanical drive in death throes) but they still don't have a backup strategy. Maybe in the early 90s the idea of backing up your hard drive to several floppy disks was too much trouble, but these days you can buy flash drives big enough to handle your most critical, irreplaceable files in drug stores. Doesn't have to be anything super fancy or special, just so long as you replicate it to another physical device... or, also a feature these days, "The Cloud", so long as you don't mind your data being physically outside of devices you control.
I used to put a work partition on peoples computers and leave a shortcut on the desktop, and change all the default save directories to that partition so that it was easier for me to recover that data. ....but people still changed it back to default or made thier own folders on the OS partition. Still, it gave me more work.
Some time ago, i had a hdd with stuck head - so i used the oldest trick in the book, placed it in the freezer and saved all the data. Question is, is there some more professional approach you were using at work?
Expecting people to remember to do a thing? May as well be asking them to learn to program in cobol. I'm sure those poor sods didn't know what to do with those sticks... Which is why there are the "just plug this thing in and it'll auto back up all your files" sticks. that they still forget to use. And to be fair, I'm very airheaded and forget to backup my stuff until something reminds me to (which normally winds up being about once a year.) But also my data is automatically in 2-3 places at once (photos stay on the SD card even after being copied to the HD, most active files live on the cloud and are downloaded about once a year for "just in case" and cell phone photos are also cloud backed up until they're downloaded and stuffed on an external. ) Passive data backup strategies are honestly the best way to go because humans are forgetful creatures. Also @CaptainSouthbird Nothing would get me to scramble to find a fresh external drive than my HD acting funny. Weird HD noises/functions are the most paranoia inducing nightmares.... (also, back in the early 90s, it was the floppies that failed more than the HDs, feels like.)
I've had idiots (yes idiots) come up to me and ask me where their documents and emails were when I told them 20 times that the drives would be wiped and everything on it will be gone. Best practice is to never tell anyone you repair computers if it isn't your primary line of work.
Yup, I thought so. Question is, why does TH-cam let crap like this be advertised? Don't they ever check anything ?? A strong case cab and should be made that TH-cam is as complicit with the criminality as the fraudsters themselves.
A family member bought one for me ages ago when they first came out (like around March). This video is correct, but I've still found many uses for it. Reading older IDE drives, and internal sata drives which I used to do plugging into an old desktop can now be done with USB, I find it quite useful. It is just unfortunate the price.
I wonder when Ken will cover the scam that drive savers is. They're charging 3k to people when they don't even diagnose the issue. Ken needs to speak up on this
That is the thing. DriveSaver's reputation has been polarizing. "They were able to recover data from near-impossible cases!" "They charged me $3000 for something that could've been remedied with a $100 part replacement."
Lol...this is insane. I say as someone who managed to have the luck to lose the computer drive and the backup drive at the same time and it took the specialists 8 months to get the photos from the self-encrypting modern drive.
Not only that but we got to find out about Drive Savers. I can guarantee that backing up data is cheaper than Drive Savers. (Thank heavens not from first hand experience.) I had a friend whose BACKUP FAILED and she needed these miracle workers.
I accidentally deleted all my music, google to the rescue. Download a small program for FREE fired it up chose which drive, hit the go button and wala all my music was back. The music was originally backed up, but guess what I lost it in my house somewhere, to this day I still can’t find it, those little bugger sure no how to hide. Great video, cheers from Australia 🇦🇺
I bought one of those converters years ago for about $20 just so I could read stuff old hard drives from computers that I had junked. I knew what I was getting and was happy with it for the price.
@@Xiy114 A friend told me he could use his HDMI screen and do it and he did. Plugged my laptop into his screen and then he copied everything onto a flashdrve. I then went and bought my own hdmi screen for $70.
One thing I'd add is for Backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site I have some photos I lost because I forgot the password for the original copy and the hard drive head crashed on my second copy. If i had a third copy off site, i could still have them today.
I actually have one of these (different brand obviously) bought it 15+ years ago. Super handy to have in my desk drawer if I want to investigate a random hard drive I've acquired.
Hi Ken! I have an identical looking unit with a branding of UNITECH. I bought it just to access old drives which it does perfectly. It also has a big button to backup stuff but never used it for that. But they look identical apart from the branding. And it was never advertised to me as a drive fixer.❤ from UK!
@@mustacheboyo yea, it's just such a con marketing as a data recovery unit. And let's be honest, an old hard drive normally means an old person(like me) who may not know that a piece of plastic ain't getting grannys photos back.
I mostly use things like that for when I’m upgrading the drive in a computer to a higher capacity one to clone the old drive onto the new one, then expand the volume to fill the empty space. I have a SATA to USB, SATA to FireWire, and NVME to USB. Sometimes I also use the SATA ones with a pile of 2TB MX500s as cheaper external storage than an actual external SSD.
If the big red button actually initiates a data transfer between drives purely using hardware and not the computer its connected to, thats very useful and quite impressive for a retail device.
Good episode. I liked how you actually showed what data recovery services actually do and how they would diagnose a dead flash drive. How fast was the interface on this product? USB 2.0 I'm guessing?
Personal Backup - I use an external RAID 0 Enclosure with dual 2TB (Sequential Serial Numbers) of HDD Storage (total 2TB Storage). If a HDD fails the device tells me and as soon as I pop in a new 2TB HDD it automatically rebuilds the RAID 0 Configuration.
6:50 but this isn’t a hard drive, it’s a SSD At the same time they are still wrong if you have MFM, SCSI or SAS hard drives, none of which can connect to the Zilkee
If you are going to roll back so far in time to bring of MFM, you may as well add RLL and ESDI to your list of antiquated technologies (other than SAS) with which the Zilkee will not interface. 🙂 Beyond that, I agree with you: the NVMe drive mentioned is a solid state drive, not a hard drive. That is like comparing a floppy drive to a QIC-80 or DAT tape drive. They all still use magnetic media but are quite different technologies.
Another thing that's an issue that wasn't mentioned in the video, is that some buyers leaving comments on social media say that their adapters didn't come with a mains power cable. So you've got people just plugging them in as if they're unpowered USB hubs... and of course, nothing happens when they attach a drive.
one thing you might wanna have mentioned is that the price for professional data recovery can easily get into the mid-triple digits because of all the cleanroom stuff.
Sometimes the information that needs to be recovered is more valuable than that price...From the photos stored in a broken cell phone to a destroyed server with the data of a company's payroll, if such information can be recovered, it will be worth the price.
@@Nolroa sure i won't deny that, the idea is that knowing what such a recovery costs and why so much normally brings these "miracle products" into a perspective tho.
This video is exactly why I love your channel so much. Informative with a healthy dose of humor and pop culture references! Makes me happy to be a nerd every time you upload. I knew this was going to be a good one when you said "H-E-double hockey sticks", my favorite euphemism of all time 😂
Everyone should practice 3, 2, 1 Backup procedures. Which works like this: 3 data copies (1 production copy, 2 backup copies) 2 media type backups (1 local like a 2nd drive or NAS and the 2nd on 2 rotatable portable devices like a USB drive) and last is 1 offsite backup like cloud storage or that portable USB drive mentioned previously. This practice gives you immediate access onsite to your backups and if you have a fire etc then you have the offsite backup. I set my backups to take place automatically and just have to recall to take my rotatable USB drive to work every so often. Yes I'm a 25 year IT Admin veteran and know how important these backups are and know a large majority of you won't listen until it's too late! Oh and use Google Photos to backup all your photos online! It's so simple! I do set it up for my kids too and none of them have ever lost any photos no matter what happens to their phones! Happy backing up!
It’s nice that you usually have a discovery channel like segment whereby we get to learn the things that go behind the scenes. Any plans to have like a standalone segment separate from the product scams? Haha
3:02 the _smoke in the box_ is trying to mimic the *ads* that add _smoke effect_ for a *"fancier"* and *"professional"* look except that it doesn't *fit* well it's been years since i've last watched an entire ad on tvs
I saw an add for this thing the other day and thought to myself I could use a new IDE/SATA to USB adapter( mine is kind of old) and was curious what kind of software they must be including with this thing to recover hard drives. But then I saw the price and laughed. Great video ken.
Amazing episode. This Zilkee “data recovery device” is nothing much more than a external storage device with ports for 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch storage with IDE and SATA connectors. You don’t want to buy this product if you want to recover your data from broken drives, but on other hand it can be used as a device that can read and write from different sized drives in different connection types just to see what’s on the storage medium and write files to it, not for recovering data from it.
Very cool video! Looking at the Zimmerman ads, it’s clear that it’s an adapter, not unlike an external hard drive enclosure. I just wasn’t aware it was available at a much cheaper price. Thanks!
My favourite story about data recovery is the case from the 1990s when a man who murdered his wife tried to dispose of evidence by cutting some 5 1/4" floppy disks into pieces with pinking shears (a type of scissors with serrated blades) and the forensics investigators recovered the data by using, as I remember, Scotch tape and and new floppy disk as a template.
My favorite is how btk(serial killer) was caught. He straight up called the police, asked if a floppy disk could be traced(they said no) and he sent over a disk to the news that lead RIGHT back to his church. He was subsequently arrested and he’s rotting in jail where he belongs.
Thanks, I need to recover data from an external hard drive and I was about to order this product......you just saved me money and a lot of aggravation........
Actually it could, but it would go beyond a simple converter. It'd likely be in the form of an ARM SOC running some form of Linux with built-in recovery tools. That would be super redundant though since you could just run those tools on a connected PC. Though there are specific docks useful for data recovery and data forensics such as those from WiebeTech, but their only real party trick is their write blocking capability.
When I discovered that their product could not just plug into my eternal hard drive with a USB and is incompatible with it I then discovered per their return policy they only accept returns for products that are defective or damaged. Since they ship their product United Stats Postal Service (USPS) can't they be prosecuted on a Federal charge of mail fraud?
Ken, this episode was hilarious and informative in equal measure! I don't like waiting for you to publish content but when it's this good it's worth the wait! Thanks for another superb episode. 👍👍
How to bring your dead hard drive back to life (Tutorial by zilky 1. Take it out 2. get a lighter 3. BURN IT 4. insert back into computer. 5. Wait for computer to burn. AND YOUR DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I did Work Experience at a company which repaired the old Seagate hard drives back in the 80s. We used to have drives from military sources and they would send a soldier to stand over us while we worked to change the platters etc. - talk about no pressure!!
When it comes to data backup remember the three R's: Redundancy, Reliability, Recovery. Cloud is an option but it shouldnt be the only option. Use both a drive and the cloud.
I just got an ad for 30% off a Zilkee and looked for reviews. I came across this site. Ken, you just cost Zilkee a sale. Plus, I'm reporting it as a scam to Facebook. What an enjoyable video! Say hi to Martha. Lou
I just used this device to recover some very old data on 4 different hard drives I had sitting around for a couple of years. They weren't' encrypted, they were just some old hard drives I didn't want to throw away, All I wanted to do was retrieve some old family photos, some music and some old backed up files. it took me a while, but it DID WORK. I don't know about it working on encrypted data, (because I don't encrypt mine), but it DID get me into my sister's old laptop which she had password protected. I got access to some of her old files right away without having to break a password. If ALL you want to do is retrieve olde files from long unused hard drives, this thing worked like a charm. 😀
This was the best Computer Clan episode I've seen so far. Krazy Ken has become one of my favourite interweb personalities, and I have GREAT taste. I can't believe he only has 418k subs... What's occurring?
I wish I saw this before I purchased two Zilkee's. I'll be emailing them comments asap! I needed the hard drive TBs along with some of the other things it doesn't do. Thank you so much.
I bought two, unbranded ones from AliExpress, knowing full well what they are. To be honest, they were advertised as 2.5"/3.5" IDE/SATA to USB adapters. The only inconsistency is that they require external power even for 2.5" drives.
Literally any of my hard drives? Including my SAS drives? My MFM drives? My proprietary (actually just ST-506 with a different connector) drives for the IBM PS/2 Model 50? I have lots of weird drives, I'd love something that can connect to literally any of them!
I just saw the facebook ad for this product in the wild, and shared your video with them, I hope that it saves at least someone from wasting their money
2:35 Hearing you reference Aggretsuko makes me very happy. 3:34 TWO references to Aggretsuko? You like that series, don't you, Ken? Eh, I don't blame you, it's pretty flippin' awesome.
I have one of these. I needed to access data on some old IDE drives, so I looked on Amazon and this came up at a reasonable price. So I simply plugged it in to the appropriate places and it let me read my old IDE drives and copy the files I needed over to my laptop with no problems. I knew exactly what it was, and what I needed it for. I was under no other illusions of what this device could do. I didn't see any ads prior to purchase, but I see how confusing they could be to someone who is not tech savvy. Mine also cost a lot less than $90. I think it was about £20.
So: They used generic, fake ads to promote their product, overpriced their product, then “discounted” it, and upsold you on something else, had blatant inconsistencies everywhere, etc. Wow, this is a totally legitimate product!
I bought one of those, years ago, for five quid, with a proper 3 prong power adapter. But they were sold as an external hard-drive connector. For testing / partitioning / transfer etc. And when I saw these being advertised. I thought I had misheard. Nasty.
If anyone asks themselves: With such a tiny flying height, won't heads crash on the surface even if you slightly bump against your PC? And the answer is: Not at all. Because the disk below it spins so fast (> 3000 RPM, often 5400 or 7200 RPM), it drags the air directly above the disk surface with it. The result is an air cushion which pushes the head upwards, similar to a hovercraft, and it pushes the harder the closer the head gets to the disk. You need to drop a spinning disk from about one meter onto a hard surface to make its head crash on the disk. Laptop disk drives typically have a sensor that recognizes when you drop the laptop and will park the heads in a safe space to prevent that from happening, as soon as the laptop has fallen around half a meter, so your laptop may get damaged but not your drive.
I came to this video just to check on that sus product Zilkee. I came away entertained, educated and amazed at the quality I found. Fantastic channel and I will be back!
I use to work for Sprint and people who weren't using cloud backup would want me to recover their pictures from their phone they ran over. I told them to Google data recovery service. There are companies that may be able to get them back but it's going to be hundreds or thousands of dollars. They would yell at me because i couldn't do it.
I bought the same "USB 3.0 to SATA IDE ATA Data Adapter 3 in 1 for PC..." from aliexpress for 14,68 euros some years ago because I needed a converter to connect some hard drives to my pc without having to open it up every time.
I always find it funny I tend to get TH-cam ads about many of the products he’s debunking on the video debunking them. It makes me giggle especially when the ac ones were new.
Just looking at the thumbnail, i already knew it had to be a HDD/SSD docking station. And of course my inner IT self clicked on this video out of curiosity. (And because it's a computer clan video. what's not to love here?)
for anyone who has one of these devices and find it disconnecting from your pc randomly , get a higher amp power supply and make sure it is 12 volts or you'll fry it tbh ken i've had worse tech than this in the past that died for no reason (btw mine cost £16.48 or 21.06 United States Dollars from bg ) one thing i found is it won't connect to a 4 to 6 gb hard drive (this might be down to the version i got from bg ) yes folks that was a size of hard drive years ago ,and suprisingly enough to run windows xp (their was even a 2000$ 10 mb version i don't remember the year but ye lol 😀🤣😀😊) another great video though ken 👍
Ken, love your channel, had something similar for a few years of Amazon, and it has a copy button on it also, it works great for cloning drives but takes ages. Keep the great content coming, pal.
Enjoy the new episode! Sooo much love and work was poured into this so I hope you love it! 🔔And subscribe and stay tuned because on JUNE 29 I'm debunking the Chillwell scam! That's right! I'm revisiting those horrible "Portable AC" units. It's been a while. 😈 June 29!
enjoyin
Ken on a serious note you may wanna blur/black out your recovery key for file vault 4:39
@@dw_2005shush dude
Chilly Willy (well) is a scam? Holy shit, I'm marking the 29th on my calendar. I wanna see his fall from grace and finally get exposed as not being a cartoon penguin.
Man those "portable AC" scam saga never ends
I would burst into laugh if the "Lit Mobile portable solar charger scam" got another sequel
At this point if a product is being advertised on social media I'm just assuming it's a scam by default.
Yep. I got burned by a cheap toy that looked like it’d make a great gift. It wasn’t great. It looked nothing like the item in the ad. Lesson learned.
Months later, my husband handed me a little thumb drive that he had bought online. He said it was a 2 TB drive. I knew better because I watch Krazy Ken! We plugged it into an old laptop - I wasn’t sticking that thing into a computer I actually use - and transferred about 100 GB of files to it as a test. It looked like it worked, but I made my husband try to open some files. A few opened, but most didn’t. I explained that the little drive was probably a 32 or 64 GB drive at most, any any data that exceeded that amount was just overwritten on the data already written. That was a more expensive lesson at about $120 for the two drives he bought.
No more purchases from ads on social media in this household.
@@DaveTexasmobile game ads be like
Anything advertised to death through TH-cam sponsorships is usually also at best a cheap product with a high price tag
Another big red flag is any ad that uses text to speech. I don't think I've seen one using it that wasn't a scam.
I have never trusted any ad ive ever seen on the internet
Ken is so advanced that he calls the future with a corded phone that’s cordless. Damn. That’s high tech. That lair is some place.
What can I say? I like being ahead of the times.
Sent from my BlackBerry Storm.
That's the best use of retro technology I've seen for ages!!
@@ComputerClan Hey, can I come over?
@@ComputerClan 🤣
Naw - it's a wireless radio phone ! I'm old enough to remember using such like . The antenna must not be extened !
Wow a $5 USB HDD adapter for $30+. 😐 scammers will stop at nothing 😢
the ones with that many ports genrily run 12-20 bucks. :p
Is it bad I paid $22 for one 4 years ago? It's a clamshell like dock so it encapsulates the drive I plug in. It's USB 3.0 and takes 3½" and 2½" HDDs and SSDs. I figure it's better than a ribbon cable doohickey with an adapter hardwired onto it.
@@Devious_Reviewsthat's different, that's for making an external hard drive, you are paying for the clamshell
Damm, why are there scammers in this word, why?
Thanks for being top comment and being more or less accidently a big spoiler xD
Zilkee: "RECOVER YOUR HARD DRIVE"
Also Zilkee: *"Burns it."* 😎
*Proceeds to burn it*
Well, to be fair, if you did exactly what that ad showed them doing with the lighter, you'd be able to use the Zilkee with it. I don't know WHY you would hold a BIC one foot under an HDD for one second, but Zilkee could recover it. Maybe it was Old Man Ken thinking that it was like a stuck jar and if you heat it up, it's easier to get the contents out 😂
I hate that these scam products are trying to target non-techy customers with the promise of an easy solution to their problem.
And WHAPAM, they get screwed by their naïvity.
I remember a few months back when there was a scam ad about "how to recover data from water damaged drive" and when clicked, it redirects to a "Wondershare Recovery Data" app that forces you to buy their subscription (It was also explained by Louis Rosmann in his video: "Wondershare is a garbage company")
Kinda similar to this type of scam
How did you get the double tittle
@@sihamhamda47 My “favourite” is the unusable free versions of various Windows-only partitioning programs like EaseUS Partition Master and AOMEI Partition Assistant.
They look like they’re the same program and the free version is literally unable to handle partitioning, so that is basically a mockup of the paid, functioning program.
Thank God, EaseUS ditched that handicapped free version for one that can actually do basic partitioning, like what a free version of a commercial partitioning tool needs to do…
But AOMEI still has an unusable free version.
@@rudeskalamander tittIes normally come in pairs anyway... That's a capital i in there!
I accidentally firmware-locked myself out of my MacBook Pro last year. I was doing some maintenance on the battery which required me to disconnect the battery connector. Little did I know, doing so would trigger the firmware lock, which I put on the laptop years ago and had completely forgotten. I had to take it to an Apple store to have them bypass and remove the firmware lock. There was a high chance that all of my data would be corrupted, but thankfully all of my data was retrieved safely! After that, I learned two things: 1) always make backups of your data, and 2) always keep a record of your passwords (or, don't put a firmware lock on a computer in the first place).
3) Better ask real independent repair shops like Louis Rossmann because chances are pretty high to get help when Apple tells you something else.
The only time I've seen the Mac firmware lock used was on the school library PCs which were all really iMacs (and this was before the coloured ones, if they had those they probably would've bought only silver ones). My guess is that they locked it in order to prevent students from getting into the recovery partition, because I know the school's IT people would get real salty if they saw anyone installing and running their own apps in the home folders on the student accounts (which were all local accounts as the MOE had Active Directory for Windows but not Open Directory for macOS and Linux-based desktop OSes).
Edit: The thing about students running their own apps only worked if it was a .app file rather than a .pkg or .mpkg file.
...and 3; If you make any important settings changes, record them in a log book or like I do, in the spare pages at the back of my computers installation manual)
Why did you assume that data would be corrupted? The computer was turned of and there is no reason for it to have corrupted the data...
As someone who repairs laptops and PC's for a living I have lost count of the times people have come to me for data recovery and I must have said "back up your data" a million times over a 20 year period. I even bought a load of cheap USB2 memory sticks that I gave to customers for free, they were big enough at 8GB to back up your pictures, which is the most common thing people lose in my experience, but even with a FREE stick most people still didn't back up their data. The back up process is even easier nowadays with cloud storage being thrown at you by every tech company going and most laptops/PC's have 2 drives in them making copying a folder so easy it's laughable but people still won't back up their data!!!!!
I know, this drives me crazy too... I've even talked to people who are at least aware they're suffering hard drive problems (odd noises, extremely poor performance, etc., signs of a mechanical drive in death throes) but they still don't have a backup strategy. Maybe in the early 90s the idea of backing up your hard drive to several floppy disks was too much trouble, but these days you can buy flash drives big enough to handle your most critical, irreplaceable files in drug stores. Doesn't have to be anything super fancy or special, just so long as you replicate it to another physical device... or, also a feature these days, "The Cloud", so long as you don't mind your data being physically outside of devices you control.
I used to put a work partition on peoples computers and leave a shortcut on the desktop, and change all the default save directories to that partition so that it was easier for me to recover that data. ....but people still changed it back to default or made thier own folders on the OS partition. Still, it gave me more work.
Some time ago, i had a hdd with stuck head - so i used the oldest trick in the book, placed it in the freezer and saved all the data. Question is, is there some more professional approach you were using at work?
Expecting people to remember to do a thing? May as well be asking them to learn to program in cobol. I'm sure those poor sods didn't know what to do with those sticks... Which is why there are the "just plug this thing in and it'll auto back up all your files" sticks. that they still forget to use.
And to be fair, I'm very airheaded and forget to backup my stuff until something reminds me to (which normally winds up being about once a year.) But also my data is automatically in 2-3 places at once (photos stay on the SD card even after being copied to the HD, most active files live on the cloud and are downloaded about once a year for "just in case" and cell phone photos are also cloud backed up until they're downloaded and stuffed on an external. ) Passive data backup strategies are honestly the best way to go because humans are forgetful creatures.
Also @CaptainSouthbird Nothing would get me to scramble to find a fresh external drive than my HD acting funny. Weird HD noises/functions are the most paranoia inducing nightmares....
(also, back in the early 90s, it was the floppies that failed more than the HDs, feels like.)
I've had idiots (yes idiots) come up to me and ask me where their documents and emails were when I told them 20 times that the drives would be wiped and everything on it will be gone.
Best practice is to never tell anyone you repair computers if it isn't your primary line of work.
Yup, I thought so. Question is, why does TH-cam let crap like this be advertised? Don't they ever check anything ?? A strong case cab and should be made that TH-cam is as complicit with the criminality as the fraudsters themselves.
YT would probably make the argument that "The advertiser signed a contract saying they would follow all appropriate laws"
They let horrible advertisers do whatever they want bc it makes the big bucks. Yt also has big lawyers so good luck trying to make a case
One of the most polished and interesting tech shows on TH-cam
Definitely
Thanks 😎
@@ComputerClan remember the circuit board I was talking about?
The sonar ping in the background is unnecessary and distracting.
Man, all this data recovery info is not the content we asked, but the content we deserve.
The last advertisement wants you to restore your Zilkee with another Zilkee, I think
A family member bought one for me ages ago when they first came out (like around March). This video is correct, but I've still found many uses for it. Reading older IDE drives, and internal sata drives which I used to do plugging into an old desktop can now be done with USB, I find it quite useful.
It is just unfortunate the price.
I wonder when Ken will cover the scam that drive savers is. They're charging 3k to people when they don't even diagnose the issue. Ken needs to speak up on this
That is the thing. DriveSaver's reputation has been polarizing.
"They were able to recover data from near-impossible cases!"
"They charged me $3000 for something that could've been remedied with a $100 part replacement."
I’m in California, trust me, San Francisco is not the place you want to be.
-"iam always tight "
-"I didn't need to know that "
that made me laugh !!
Lol...this is insane. I say as someone who managed to have the luck to lose the computer drive and the backup drive at the same time and it took the specialists 8 months to get the photos from the self-encrypting modern drive.
Way to take a dry subject like scam busting and make it comedic and entertaining! Well done!! I really enjoyed this episode!
Thank you!
I think you'd really like Kit Boga. He is a hilarious scambaiter
Not only that but we got to find out about Drive Savers. I can guarantee that backing up data is cheaper than Drive Savers. (Thank heavens not from first hand experience.)
I had a friend whose BACKUP FAILED and she needed these miracle workers.
@@subtledemisefox Nah, his content is mid and he is kinda toxic.
Aggretsuko, scams, Martha, Amazing world of gumball house.....this video has it all
I accidentally deleted all my music, google to the rescue. Download a small program for FREE fired it up chose which drive, hit the go button and wala all my music was back. The music was originally backed up, but guess what I lost it in my house somewhere, to this day I still can’t find it, those little bugger sure no how to hide. Great video, cheers from Australia 🇦🇺
I bought one of those converters years ago for about $20 just so I could read stuff old hard drives from computers that I had junked. I knew what I was getting and was happy with it for the price.
Knowing where to look I’ve seen them for around 15. This is clearly trying to profit on the tech shy.
Yea they're great little devices. SATA only ones are so cheap that nearly every SATA SSD comes with one now.
Can I use a converter to retrieve photos from a laptop that has a broken screen?
@@johnsmith-td9ty it should. The mechanics themselves should still work.
@@Xiy114 A friend told me he could use his HDMI screen and do it and he did. Plugged my laptop into his screen and then he copied everything onto a flashdrve. I then went and bought my own hdmi screen for $70.
One thing I'd add is for Backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule:
3 copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site
I have some photos I lost because I forgot the password for the original copy and the hard drive head crashed on my second copy. If i had a third copy off site, i could still have them today.
When will Crazy Ken finally learn that Electronics + Fire = Goodness
Toasty.
I actually have one of these (different brand obviously) bought it 15+ years ago. Super handy to have in my desk drawer if I want to investigate a random hard drive I've acquired.
Hi Ken! I have an identical looking unit with a branding of UNITECH. I bought it just to access old drives which it does perfectly. It also has a big button to backup stuff but never used it for that. But they look identical apart from the branding. And it was never advertised to me as a drive fixer.❤ from UK!
I have the same one as you. These devices mostly afaik use the InnoStor 611 chipset
@@mustacheboyo yea, it's just such a con marketing as a data recovery unit. And let's be honest, an old hard drive normally means an old person(like me) who may not know that a piece of plastic ain't getting grannys photos back.
I mostly use things like that for when I’m upgrading the drive in a computer to a higher capacity one to clone the old drive onto the new one, then expand the volume to fill the empty space. I have a SATA to USB, SATA to FireWire, and NVME to USB.
Sometimes I also use the SATA ones with a pile of 2TB MX500s as cheaper external storage than an actual external SSD.
If the big red button actually initiates a data transfer between drives purely using hardware and not the computer its connected to, thats very useful and quite impressive for a retail device.
Been seeing these ads on TH-cam.... Been thinking of asking you to look in on them. Thank you for doing so!!
I report these scam products to facebook all the time and they do nothing.
Triplicate. All drives backed in triplicate. Lost 1TB of my precious memories before I learned what RAID is.
Good episode. I liked how you actually showed what data recovery services actually do and how they would diagnose a dead flash drive.
How fast was the interface on this product? USB 2.0 I'm guessing?
Personal Backup - I use an external RAID 0 Enclosure with dual 2TB (Sequential Serial Numbers) of HDD Storage (total 2TB Storage).
If a HDD fails the device tells me and as soon as I pop in a new 2TB HDD it automatically rebuilds the RAID 0 Configuration.
6:50 but this isn’t a hard drive, it’s a SSD
At the same time they are still wrong if you have MFM, SCSI or SAS hard drives, none of which can connect to the Zilkee
If you are going to roll back so far in time to bring of MFM, you may as well add RLL and ESDI to your list of antiquated technologies (other than SAS) with which the Zilkee will not interface. 🙂 Beyond that, I agree with you: the NVMe drive mentioned is a solid state drive, not a hard drive. That is like comparing a floppy drive to a QIC-80 or DAT tape drive. They all still use magnetic media but are quite different technologies.
Also, entertainment value is 10x what Ive seen before. Rewound this one several times. Bravo Ken!
Another thing that's an issue that wasn't mentioned in the video, is that some buyers leaving comments on social media say that their adapters didn't come with a mains power cable. So you've got people just plugging them in as if they're unpowered USB hubs... and of course, nothing happens when they attach a drive.
one thing you might wanna have mentioned is that the price for professional data recovery can easily get into the mid-triple digits because of all the cleanroom stuff.
Sometimes the information that needs to be recovered is more valuable than that price...From the photos stored in a broken cell phone to a destroyed server with the data of a company's payroll, if such information can be recovered, it will be worth the price.
@@Nolroa sure i won't deny that, the idea is that knowing what such a recovery costs and why so much normally brings these "miracle products" into a perspective tho.
I love the way this chanel turned from old devices comparison to scam products.
This is great and the explanation are also great.
This video is exactly why I love your channel so much. Informative with a healthy dose of humor and pop culture references! Makes me happy to be a nerd every time you upload.
I knew this was going to be a good one when you said "H-E-double hockey sticks", my favorite euphemism of all time 😂
Everyone should practice 3, 2, 1 Backup procedures. Which works like this: 3 data copies (1 production copy, 2 backup copies) 2 media type backups (1 local like a 2nd drive or NAS and the 2nd on 2 rotatable portable devices like a USB drive) and last is 1 offsite backup like cloud storage or that portable USB drive mentioned previously. This practice gives you immediate access onsite to your backups and if you have a fire etc then you have the offsite backup. I set my backups to take place automatically and just have to recall to take my rotatable USB drive to work every so often. Yes I'm a 25 year IT Admin veteran and know how important these backups are and know a large majority of you won't listen until it's too late! Oh and use Google Photos to backup all your photos online! It's so simple! I do set it up for my kids too and none of them have ever lost any photos no matter what happens to their phones! Happy backing up!
I have 2 thumbdrives for all my passwords. And just a 5tb for my other stuff.
It’s nice that you usually have a discovery channel like segment whereby we get to learn the things that go behind the scenes. Any plans to have like a standalone segment separate from the product scams? Haha
3:02 the _smoke in the box_ is trying to mimic the *ads* that add _smoke effect_ for a *"fancier"* and *"professional"* look
except that it doesn't *fit* well
it's been years since i've last watched an entire ad on tvs
You're very good at exposing scams and making a video that's both entertaining and informative, all at the same time. Great job!
I saw an add for this thing the other day and thought to myself I could use a new IDE/SATA to USB adapter( mine is kind of old) and was curious what kind of software they must be including with this thing to recover hard drives. But then I saw the price and laughed. Great video ken.
Amazing episode. This Zilkee “data recovery device” is nothing much more than a external storage device with ports for 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch storage with IDE and SATA connectors.
You don’t want to buy this product if you want to recover your data from broken drives, but on other hand it can be used as a device that can read and write from different sized drives in different connection types just to see what’s on the storage medium and write files to it, not for recovering data from it.
Very cool video! Looking at the Zimmerman ads, it’s clear that it’s an adapter, not unlike an external hard drive enclosure. I just wasn’t aware it was available at a much cheaper price. Thanks!
My favourite story about data recovery is the case from the 1990s when a man who murdered his wife tried to dispose of evidence by cutting some 5 1/4" floppy disks into pieces with pinking shears (a type of scissors with serrated blades) and the forensics investigators recovered the data by using, as I remember, Scotch tape and and new floppy disk as a template.
Guess that was her scissors he used as well... The cheek of it... 😑
My favorite is how btk(serial killer) was caught. He straight up called the police, asked if a floppy disk could be traced(they said no) and he sent over a disk to the news that lead RIGHT back to his church.
He was subsequently arrested and he’s rotting in jail where he belongs.
Thanks, I need to recover data from an external hard drive and I was about to order this product......you just saved me money and a lot of aggravation........
i NEED to see what’s on the other flask drive NOW.
No one can see Martha 😔
(Old Man Ken told me to say this)
OLD KEN FOR THE 50TH TIME I. AM. NOT. MARTHA!
In addition to the horrible marketing…. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen!!!!
even though CONVERSION TECHNOLOGY is cool, there is no way a converter can do what they claimed
Actually it could, but it would go beyond a simple converter. It'd likely be in the form of an ARM SOC running some form of Linux with built-in recovery tools. That would be super redundant though since you could just run those tools on a connected PC. Though there are specific docks useful for data recovery and data forensics such as those from WiebeTech, but their only real party trick is their write blocking capability.
When I discovered that their product could not just plug into my eternal hard drive with a USB and is incompatible with it I then discovered per their return policy they only accept returns for products that are defective or damaged. Since they ship their product United Stats Postal Service (USPS) can't they be prosecuted on a Federal charge of mail fraud?
Ken, this episode was hilarious and informative in equal measure! I don't like waiting for you to publish content but when it's this good it's worth the wait! Thanks for another superb episode. 👍👍
3:34 I LOVE this part! Keep it up Ken! You're doing amazing videos!
Thanks! I had a lot of fun making that part. (I rewatched it a lot.)
You're very welcome! ❤
The real question is, what's the music, I've been trying to find it for the past hour lol
@@supersillysammy272 Cold Light from Jay Ray
@@JackThunder67 Poggers, thank you
Man! My 9GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI drive from my Amiga 4000 can't be attached?
Any of my hard drives? ANY of them? I have some U-scsi 3 drives and sas drives that may argue.
LITERALLY ANY
How to bring your dead hard drive back to life (Tutorial by zilky
1. Take it out
2. get a lighter
3. BURN IT
4. insert back into computer.
5. Wait for computer to burn.
AND YOUR DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
0:06 - Canadian detected
I did Work Experience at a company which repaired the old Seagate hard drives back in the 80s. We used to have drives from military sources and they would send a soldier to stand over us while we worked to change the platters etc. - talk about no pressure!!
“I’m always tight :)”
“And I didn’t need to know that”
Why did that make me cackle lol
When it comes to data backup remember the three R's: Redundancy, Reliability, Recovery.
Cloud is an option but it shouldnt be the only option. Use both a drive and the cloud.
I dont trust cloud😂
I save my shit on a internet less pc and 2 thumb drives.
12:40, "Sorry, I'm not very good at geometry." Did you mean geography? 😂
Don't worry I'm better at geometry too.
6:50 Now, to play Devil’s Advocate for a second, the ad did say HARD DRIVES, and I’m fairly certain that NVMe M.2 SSDs are not Hard Drives.
All you need is the right cable, ddrescue (not dd_rescue) and photorec. Job done, every time.
I just got an ad for 30% off a Zilkee and looked for reviews. I came across this site. Ken, you just cost Zilkee a sale. Plus, I'm reporting it as a scam to Facebook. What an enjoyable video! Say hi to Martha. Lou
I clicked faster than I realized that this was a scam
I just used this device to recover some very old data on 4 different hard drives I had sitting around for a couple of years. They weren't' encrypted, they were just some old hard drives I didn't want to throw away, All I wanted to do was retrieve some old family photos, some music and some old backed up files. it took me a while, but it DID WORK. I don't know about it working on encrypted data, (because I don't encrypt mine), but it DID get me into my sister's old laptop which she had password protected. I got access to some of her old files right away without having to break a password. If ALL you want to do is retrieve olde files from long unused hard drives, this thing worked like a charm. 😀
This was the best Computer Clan episode I've seen so far. Krazy Ken has become one of my favourite interweb personalities, and I have GREAT taste. I can't believe he only has 418k subs... What's occurring?
I wish I saw this before I purchased two Zilkee's. I'll be emailing them comments asap! I needed the hard drive TBs along with some of the other things it doesn't do. Thank you so much.
I bought two, unbranded ones from AliExpress, knowing full well what they are. To be honest, they were advertised as 2.5"/3.5" IDE/SATA to USB adapters. The only inconsistency is that they require external power even for 2.5" drives.
Literally any of my hard drives? Including my SAS drives? My MFM drives? My proprietary (actually just ST-506 with a different connector) drives for the IBM PS/2 Model 50? I have lots of weird drives, I'd love something that can connect to literally any of them!
So WiebeTech has you covered, but be prepared to pay a pretty penny as that's specialty equipment.
I just saw the facebook ad for this product in the wild, and shared your video with them, I hope that it saves at least someone from wasting their money
12:55 Is that is the house from The Amazing World of Gumball?
My mom just found the ad on Facebook. I had to talk her out of it and show her your video.
2:35 Hearing you reference Aggretsuko makes me very happy.
3:34 TWO references to Aggretsuko? You like that series, don't you, Ken? Eh, I don't blame you, it's pretty flippin' awesome.
I have one of these. I needed to access data on some old IDE drives, so I looked on Amazon and this came up at a reasonable price. So I simply plugged it in to the appropriate places and it let me read my old IDE drives and copy the files I needed over to my laptop with no problems. I knew exactly what it was, and what I needed it for. I was under no other illusions of what this device could do. I didn't see any ads prior to purchase, but I see how confusing they could be to someone who is not tech savvy. Mine also cost a lot less than $90. I think it was about £20.
I am using Zilkee right now. And I am recovering all my data from Dell Inspiron E1705 SATA hard drive. It works just like they said it would!! 🤷🏾
I had one of these boxes in 2008, it was like $20 at Fry's or MicroCenter. Almost the same thing. It worked great most of the time.
Have saw this video. You have now set us back another two years. Thanks
So what’s the best way to recover data
So:
They used generic, fake ads to promote their product, overpriced their product, then “discounted” it, and upsold you on something else, had blatant inconsistencies everywhere, etc.
Wow, this is a totally legitimate product!
7:07 "Let's take a look at their web presence" [ sees bootleg Samsung SSD ] Oh my BS detector is already in Maximum Overdrive with his one.
I like how chill Ken was about Half-Life 3 not working
I bought one of those, years ago, for five quid, with a proper 3 prong power adapter. But they were sold as an external hard-drive connector. For testing / partitioning / transfer etc. And when I saw these being advertised. I thought I had misheard. Nasty.
I should've known better than to trust a converter that claims to bring data back from the dead. Now I'm off to find a real wizard to fix my files
The scam busting videos are my absolute favorite. I can't wait for more
If anyone asks themselves: With such a tiny flying height, won't heads crash on the surface even if you slightly bump against your PC? And the answer is: Not at all. Because the disk below it spins so fast (> 3000 RPM, often 5400 or 7200 RPM), it drags the air directly above the disk surface with it. The result is an air cushion which pushes the head upwards, similar to a hovercraft, and it pushes the harder the closer the head gets to the disk. You need to drop a spinning disk from about one meter onto a hard surface to make its head crash on the disk. Laptop disk drives typically have a sensor that recognizes when you drop the laptop and will park the heads in a safe space to prevent that from happening, as soon as the laptop has fallen around half a meter, so your laptop may get damaged but not your drive.
I came to this video just to check on that sus product Zilkee. I came away entertained, educated and amazed at the quality I found. Fantastic channel and I will be back!
I use to work for Sprint and people who weren't using cloud backup would want me to recover their pictures from their phone they ran over. I told them to Google data recovery service. There are companies that may be able to get them back but it's going to be hundreds or thousands of dollars. They would yell at me because i couldn't do it.
I bought the same "USB 3.0 to SATA IDE ATA Data Adapter 3 in 1 for PC..." from aliexpress for 14,68 euros some years ago because I needed a converter to connect some hard drives to my pc without having to open it up every time.
I always find it funny I tend to get TH-cam ads about many of the products he’s debunking on the video debunking them. It makes me giggle especially when the ac ones were new.
Just looking at the thumbnail, i already knew it had to be a HDD/SSD docking station.
And of course my inner IT self clicked on this video out of curiosity. (And because it's a computer clan video. what's not to love here?)
If it was suffering from a logical issue we'd need a Vulcan.
Now seriously definetly one of the best channels on YT! Awesome job! 🎉
for anyone who has one of these devices and find it disconnecting from your pc randomly , get a higher amp power supply and make sure it is 12 volts or you'll fry it
tbh ken i've had worse tech than this in the past that died for no reason (btw mine cost £16.48 or 21.06 United States Dollars from bg )
one thing i found is it won't connect to a 4 to 6 gb hard drive (this might be down to the version i got from bg ) yes folks that was a size of hard drive years ago ,and suprisingly enough to run windows xp (their was even a 2000$ 10 mb version i don't remember the year but ye lol 😀🤣😀😊)
another great video though ken 👍
00:30 Nice to see a Rich Evans cameo!
The smoking box is likely for dramatic effect, like some people use dry ice to make a sort of fog effect for some reveals.
As a person that's lost 400gb of data from a hard drive failing, I'm highly offended that there are people that do this crap.
Those tyvec suits are miserable, used to wear them spraying in greenhouses. As you said, was like wearing a trash bag in 100'F+ and 100% humidity
But can it retrieve files from a cell phone?
Ken, love your channel, had something similar for a few years of Amazon, and it has a copy button on it also, it works great for cloning drives but takes ages.
Keep the great content coming, pal.
Ken! I have that exact model Iomega Harddrive, (Flask Drive, LOL) It was my first ever online purchase and it is still going strong!
H E double hockey sticks. What a throwback! 😂