Data Recovery
Sometimes companies and individuals never get round to sorting out their data backups. Then one day disaster strikes and they can't access their valuable data.
Atomik.biz always recommends having good backups but on occasions we are contacted by someone who has lost data and has no backups. These disasters can be caused by any number of reasons. In the last year we have had a user who tipped water over their PC, another who had a virus, one who had a hardware failure. The most serious was a company with a server who had a power cut and their server would not boot afterwards. Unfortunately before Atomik.biz was involved the hard disks were entrusted to an “expert” who on realising he could not read the disks decided to install Windows XP on top of the data.
The most important thing to remember if you have data loss is the more it is messed around with by the inexperienced the less likely it is to be able to get the data back. Atomik.biz has the equipment, the software and the experience to give the best chance of recovering as much data as possible.
Data recovery is not a quick process, for that reason Atomik.biz will need to take the disk back to the lab to attempt data recovery.
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Deleted Data
The most common cause of data loss is accidental deletion of data by the users of that data. As this is typically just one file or one folder then the loss is not always discovered quickly. If for example there is only one week’s worth of tapes that get recycled weekly it is very likely that the backup of a single file or folder will have been over written before its loss is discovered. For this reason is it is desirable to keep a monthly, quarterly and even yearly tape to restore data from. Having more tapes adds to costs but this has to be compared with he value of the data.
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Hardware Failure
Hardware reliability is quoted by manufacturers, and disk drives are usually in excess of 100,000 hours mean time between failures (MTBF). That is in excess of 11 years but is an average. Hardware failures do happen and often in the first few months of use.
Disk controllers, RAID controllers, motherboards and cables can all fail. If the disk drive hardware has failed, recovery of data needs very specialist tools and skills which is VERY expensive.
If any of the other parts mentioned have failed, recovering data can often be done by fitting the disk into another machine and copying the data off. If the disk is badly corrupted, specialist recovery software will be needed. 100% recovery of data is unlikely.
Atomik.biz has the hardware and recovery software to undertake data recovery.
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Corrupted data
This could be caused by a power failure, a virus, a hardware problem or even a software problem. Atomik.biz recommends having a good quality Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) to minimise power problems. Antivirus software should minimise the risk of virus infection but is no guarantee. Good quality hardware with redundant power supplies and fault tolerant disk systems will minimise hardware problems but again there are no guarantees.
Investing in the best systems to avoid these problems is money well spent but risks can be minimised, not eliminated. If disk corruption does happen then the easiest solution is to restore from backups. As a last resort data recovery might be able to recover some or even most of the data. The key to being able to recover the most data is getting it to someone with the tools and the skills before the problem is made worse.