hddr.ru is the website of the Nizhny Novgorod "Hard Disk Service Center," a private workshop for recovering data from hard drives and other storage media. The earliest preserved snapshot of the home page is dated November 6, 2003: it lists the workshop's address — Nizhny Novgorod, 150 Gorkogo Street, office 612 — and two phone numbers with the area code 8312: 35-62-49 and 78-04-02[1]. As the home page put it, "our company has been on the services market since 1999"[1]. The contact person on every surviving snapshot, from 2003 to 2026, remains the same man — Yakov Anatolyevich Kazakov[1][2][4].

The 2003 site: Gorkogo Street, an FAQ, and a news feed

The early version was titled "HDDR.RU Hard Disk Service, Nizhny Novgorod" and was built as the page of a small repair-oriented workshop. The intake department worked from 10:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, and the contact address given was hddservice-nn@mail.ru[1]. Private individuals and companies were offered service repair of all types of hard drives, data recovery, motherboard repair, chip programming, and free diagnostics[1].

The home page ran two counters of its own: the date of the last update (November 4, 2003) and the number of questions in the FAQ section — twenty-five[1]. Alongside it ran the company's news feed, which shows what the workshop was doing in the autumn of 2003: on September 1, development began on hardware and software for Serial-ATA and SCSI drives; on September 30, data recovery from digital camera flash media, urgent diagnostics, and system unit repair were added; on October 27, the warranty period on FUJITSU MPG drives was extended to three months; on November 4, a second phone line, 78-04-02, was installed and the department began opening an hour earlier[1]. At the bottom of the page stood the credits of the site's two authors: "site basis: Korb S.K., main design: Kazakov Y.A."[1].

Osharskaya Street, the clean room, and RAID work

By the March 16, 2012 snapshot, the workshop had moved to Osharskaya Street, its only phone was now the mobile number (831) 2784020, and the intake department worked from 11:00 to 21:00 with no days off[2]. The top of the page carried announcements: "DONOR DRIVE WANTED, WILL BUY AT A GOOD PRICE" and a notice that the service's floor and office number had changed[2]. Nearby were listed certificates — ROSTEST, OCC RetraTech, and the International Certification Center[2].

By this time the services had split into four lines: data recovery from hard drives, from RAID arrays, from NAND-flash electronic media (memory cards and USB drives), and the drawing-up of technical reports[2]. The site described its equipment: an EU14 (class 100) clean room for opening the sealed drive housing, in-house software — including for recovering video footage from digital video recorders — and reassembly of a RAID array's image without using the original controller; work with arrays was carried out around the clock[2]. Clients were issued an official report on letterhead with a seal and the technician's signature; out-of-town clients were promised "special priority on turnaround time," and separate sections covered the sale of components and a price list for used drives[2]. The footer kept the marks of its era: the copyright line "(c) Kazakov Y.A., 2002-2010," hosting by Business Communication Agency, and the note "Optimized for 800x600 screen resolution"[2]. The December 31, 2013 snapshot repeats this page word for word, including the last-update date of July 11, 2011[3].

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

A narrow technical service is a rare genre for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s, which was dominated by directories, forums, and trading-company sites. The domain is recorded in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating built around the Counter.nn.ru rating and the voting of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day: in the 2004 voting results, hddr.ru received one vote[5]. The site did not draw a notable audience, nor did it need to: its reader was someone whose drive had just stopped being detected.

The site's fate

Unlike most of its contemporaries, hddr.ru did not close. A check on March 15, 2026 found the same service's site still working, now titled "Professional Data Recovery in Nizhny Novgorod"[4]. The address had been refined to "69 Osharskaya Street," the phone was listed as 8 (831) 278-40-20, and the contact person was still Yakov Anatolyevich Kazakov, expert engineer, though orders were now accepted only by prior arrangement[4]. The list of media had also changed: solid-state drives had been added to hard drives and flash memory, and the client instructions now mentioned NAS network storage, video recorders, and ransomware[4].

Thus more than twenty-two years passed between the first archived snapshot and the most recent check, and the workshop itself, if its own page is to be believed, has operated since 1999 — without a change of owner or line of work[1][4].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. hddr.ru — Home page, 2026
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)