Who Is Bruce Cullen, Founder of Recover-SSD and eProvided?

Recover-SSD was founded in 2011 by Bruce Cullen, who has worked in data recovery since 1999. Before Recover-SSD he built eProvided, which he still owns and runs. Most people meet him the same way: a drive has failed, the files on it matter, and someone wants a straight answer about whether they can come back. That plain first conversation has stayed the core of his work for more than two decades, whether the drive came from a home office or from a research aircraft at the bottom of the ocean.

His focus moved to flash memory early, because flash fails in ways that spinning disks do not. A flash drive or an SSD hides a constantly changing map of where every file sits, and when that map breaks the drive can look empty while the data is still there. Explaining that difference is why this site carries guides such as how to read an SSD health warning.

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Helios was one of NASA's most ambitious aircraft: a flying wing more than 75 metres across, powered by the sun, built to fly at the edge of space. On its test flight from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai it met turbulence, broke apart and fell into the sea. NASA recovered debris from the sea.

Among it was a flash memory card holding flight data. Salt water had corroded it, and the card no longer worked as a card. Bruce recovered the raw data from it and returned it. He still keeps that card. It is the case that showed him, years before SSDs were common, that a flash device which looks destroyed can still hold its data, provided nobody writes to it first.

The Helios card also shaped the way he answers people today. The first questions are always the same: what happened to the device, has anyone powered it on since, and has anything been run on it. A card that sat in the ocean for weeks and was then left alone had a better chance than a dry drive that someone kept rebooting. That is still the most useful thing he can tell anyone holding a failed drive.

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Spirit and its twin Opportunity explored Mars for years longer than planned. Their onboard flash memory was a single point of failure that no technician could reach, which is exactly the kind of failure Bruce had spent his career on. When Spirit's flash memory misbehaved, NASA contacted him to talk it through. Not many labs can say a customer reached them from a mission running on another planet.

The lesson he takes from it is the same one this site repeats for every failing SSD: when flash starts to fail, the first decision matters more than any later one. On Mars that decision belonged to the mission engineers. On a desk at home it belongs to you, and our guide to a corrupted, read-only or RAW drive explains what to do first.

Spirit went on to work on Mars until 2010, six years past its planned 90-day mission. For Bruce the case is a reminder that flash memory problems are not limited to consumer drives. The same kind of chip sits in a rover, a camera, a phone and the SSD in a laptop, and it fails in the same few ways.

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The LDSD test vehicle carried cameras and memory cards high above the Pacific before splashing down. Cards that land in the ocean are a familiar problem for Bruce, which is why JPL lined up his lab in advance as the fallback if the cards could not be read. He has also handled paid work for JPL directly, including analysis of memory cards from crash cameras, and has advised on NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus.

He keeps the record straight on purpose. The LDSD data came back without him, and saying otherwise would be the kind of overstatement he does not allow on his own pages.

Work for space programs is a small share of his cases, but it set the standard for the rest: write down exactly what came in, what was tried, what came back and what did not. The same record-keeping now goes into every case report a home user or a small business receives.

The G-3 office plans and directs Army operations and training, and works from the Pentagon, room 2C349. When data from that office needed recovering, the job came to Bruce. A lieutenant colonel in the office then sent him an unclassified fax cover sheet asking him to call or email with the status of the data retrieval.

The answer was good news: the data came back. Bruce kept the fax because it marks the moment a Pentagon office trusted an independent specialist with its data.

The request itself is the same one every customer makes: can the data come back, how long will it take, and what will it cost. Government and military cases follow the same rules as every other case. The device stays confidential, nothing about its contents is shared, and the customer decides what happens next once they know what can be read. Over the years his case records have come to include units of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps, as the table below shows.

Recover-SSD itself was founded in 2011, so most of these cases belong to Bruce's earlier and wider work through eProvided. What carries over is the experience, not the client list: the cases that reach Recover-SSD today are mostly small businesses and home users with one drive that matters.

Questions about a drive, a guide on this site or the use of one of our images all go through our contact page for questions. If the drive has already failed, the quickest route is a free evaluation: No Data Recovered, No Data Recovery Fee.