You may find yourself wondering, is Tri-State Data Recovery legit?  See Don’s full certifications and training →

Take a moment and learn our story:

It started with a kid and a stack of PC World magazines.

Long before Tri-State Data Recovery existed, Don Anderson was a teenager reading computer magazines cover to cover, dreaming of owning a machine of his own. In 1995, that day finally came — and it changed the direction of his life. He taught himself to build systems, started repairing computers for friends and neighbors, and placed an ad in the local paper looking for work to fund the obsession. Money was tight. He worked two jobs and drove an hour each way to a low-paying job at a well-drilling outfit just to cover a small apartment.

In 2001 he earned his technician certification and landed a job at the Best Buy tech bench — back before it was Geek Squad. That’s where he first saw how data recovery was actually handled in America: customers’ drives, full of irreplaceable and often sensitive data, quietly shipped out of state to third parties. Most customers never knew. It struck him as a serious flaw hiding in plain sight — and it stayed with him.

Learning a craft America doesn’t teach.

He went back to school for a degree in Network Engineering, took contract work, and kept circling back to the problem he’d seen at that bench. In 2011 — after years of setbacks — he took the risk and founded Tri-State Data Recovery.

He quickly discovered why the outsourcing problem existed: most shops advertising data recovery were simply fronts, shipping drives out to a handful of large corporations. He also discovered that professional data recovery is, effectively, not taught in America. The one domestic course he could find cost $5,000 and turned out to be an introduction — big binders, five days, starter tools, and no real path to recovering physically damaged drives. The actual expertise lived overseas, with the engineers who develop the industry’s tools.

So Don went to the source. In August 2015 he traveled to Prague for expert-level training from ACE Lab Europe on the PC-3000 — the hardware platform the recovery industry is built on — starting with hard drives. The following August he flew to Ottawa for thirty hours of advanced training with DeepSpar, the other professional platform, on a certificate signed by the company’s founder. In October 2018 he returned to Prague and completed expert certification on PC-3000 SSD, Flash, and Monolith, covering solid-state drives, flash media, and monolithic chips with no accessible test points. Very few engineers anywhere hold expert-level certification on both platforms.

Along the way he worked in-lab with recovery engineers in the UK, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and Brazil, trading clean-room techniques that aren’t written down in any manual. He flew engineers to his own lab to keep the exchange going, and lectured on data recovery and digital forensics at Rowan University. In March 2020 he completed micro-soldering rework and repair certification through ACI Technologies in Philadelphia — the National Electronics Manufacturing Center of Excellence — for board-level work on drives where the storage is soldered down and there’s nothing to remove.

Very few people in the United States have assembled this depth of hands-on, tool-developer-level training. Don is one of them — and he did it by investing years and most of the company’s profits into becoming the engineer he couldn’t find when he needed one.