Accounts Critical It was Easter Saturday and we had a critical tape data loss which another data recovery company had failed to rectify. Within about four hours of receiving the first tape, we had several hundred megabytes of data recovery from it. The tape was poorly recorded and had many areas where the recording had broken up. The customer had a set of around 35 tapes in this condition which we also needed to look at. By 6am on Sunday we were recovering data from seven DAT tapes and extracted images of each of the disks in the RAID. A few hours later, most of the physical data had been recovered.
The areas of missing data were being re-processed to attempt to extract additional data from the tapes. However the data of major importance was from the accounts system. About 48 hours later we were still working on reading data from the damaged areas of the tapes. By the end of the following week all the Data Recovery had been successfully recovered – no mean feat considering the huge amount of data involved. Case Study: All Flooded Out A business continuity firm had a customer with a big problem – a firm of automotive engineers had archived all their important documents and drawings in a locked fireproof safe in their basement.
In total over 40 tapes and optical cartridges of various different formats had been affected, and some of the tapes had started to dry while still in the safe. Each tape was extracted from its cartridge and installed in a special cleaning rig which removed any remaining sediment. Once clean, the tape was then placed in a brand new cartridge assembly so that the data could be read. After a few hours we were able to return the recovered files and folders on a total of 26 CDs and the engineers were grateful for the return of their archives.
Data Analyzer can provide preventative consultancy tailored to your own business, to ensure you take all possible steps to avoid data loss. Here are some general tips for good practice:
• Don’t Panic – more retrievable data is lost through panic measures than anything else
• Don’t try DIY data recovery – think about the worth of your Youtube data first, then call in professional help
• Do not work on hardware – this is a highly technical field requiring special tools and techniques. Just disturbing screws on the mechanical casing can destroy a drive
• Plan your actions – understand the implications of what you’re about to do, and don’t do anything you cannot undo
• If it’s a business critical system, do you actually need to make the changes you are about to do?
• Backup prior to installing software, no matter how reputable the vendor
• Verify any backups made, with a FULL restore. Hours spent here are better than hours waiting for a recovery to be completed
• Have you optimized your system for speed rather than data security? Do you know what you have opted for?
• Machines commonly fail at start-up and shutdown
Leaving a system on in consistent environmental conditions is safest. When you do need to shut the system down, make a full backup first a disk may have failed in such a way that it can no longer start