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Plate 05 · Clean room, c. 1999
About

It's the Experience.

That was our tagline for decades, and it still says it best. Data Recovery Labs, Inc. has been taking technology apart, fixing it, and building it since 1993 - long enough to have opinions, and long enough to have earned them.

The story

Thirty years, one discipline.

DRLabs actually began as a PC and communications service company in 1990 - so in a sense, technology services was always the business. In 1993, founder Adam Sharp incorporated Data Recovery Labs and pointed it at the hardest problem in the industry: getting data back from hardware everyone else had written off. The company grew into one of a handful of North American recovery labs with a manufacturer-inspected clean room, recovering data for thousands of clients around the world. Today, that same engineering culture builds networks, software, App Store apps, and AI systems.

  • 1990

    The first workbench

    The company that would become DRL starts life as a PC and communications service shop - building, fixing, and connecting the machines businesses ran on.

  • 1993

    Data Recovery Labs, Inc.

    Adam Sharp incorporates DRL in Clearwater, Florida, focused on recovering data from failed drives - and develops proprietary recovery tools, some still in use decades later.

  • 1999

    The big lab

    DRL moves into a 14,000 square foot facility with a secured Class 10,000 clean room - one of only seven data recovery operations in North America with a clean room of its kind.

  • 2001

    The E-Hounds partnership

    In strategic partnership with E-Hounds, Inc., DRL opens an improved facility with a Class 1000 clean room and a secured evidence processing lab, bridging recovery work into computer forensics.

  • 2006

    Consolidation

    E-Hounds takes primary control of DRL operations, consolidating the recovery lab's technology with a growing forensics, eDiscovery, and litigation support practice.

  • 2015

    Curlew High Technology Center

    Operations move to the Curlew High Technology Center in Oldsmar, Florida - smaller footprint, same lab standards.

  • Today

    Technology services, apps, and AI

    DRLabs is the technology services and product side of the house: infrastructure and software engineering, iOS apps published under our own Apple Developer organization - starting with FencePost - and applied AI systems running in production.

Track record

The kind of callers a lab earns.

Over three decades, DRL's client roster ran from families with a dead drive full of photos to some of the most demanding technical organizations in the country. A few names from the archive:

NASA Goddard Los Alamos National Labs Sandia National Labs Army Corps of Engineers Florida Power Corp Tampa Electric (TECO) McDonald's Corporation New York Giants Football Hillsborough County School Board University of South Florida University of Florida GTE Public Communications
How we work

The lab rules never changed.

Nothing to hide

DRL made its name by telling clients exactly what happened and exactly what it would take to fix - in writing, before any work began. Every engagement still starts that way.

No guessing

Clean-room work punishes improvisation. Evaluate first, report honestly, then act - whether the patient is a failed RAID set, a flaky network, or an AI workflow.

Ready when it breaks

The old lab ran second and third shifts so clients had their data back by daybreak. We still build everything - systems and relationships - to hold up when it matters.

Put the experience to work.

Whatever the project - infrastructure, software, an app, or AI - it gets the same three decades of habit behind it.

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