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Data Recovery Service Odyssey: Part 2 of 2

Data Recovery Article: Network World – February 22, 2002

[Read Part One Of This Article: Data Recovery Odyssey]

Last episode, I mean issue, I recounted how I had sent off a nonworking network-attached storage device to CBL Data Recovery Technologies and was waiting for a call from the CBL technician as to the recoverability of my files.

Promptly at 9 a.m. Monday morning (in California – it was noon in New York), my phone rang. It was Dan, the CBL technician. He had the information I’d been secretly dreading. The drive in the NAS device was damaged. Specifically, the problems were:

• Damage to the volume mapping information.
• Corruption of the Linux boot-up sequence.
• Corruption of the media’s file indexing structure.

According to Dan, the drive was facing imminent logical file structure damage that could make it unrecoverable. Remember that in my previous newsletter, I said that at the first sign of damage, you need to stop all users and processes that might try to write to the device. Dan was confirming that any further attempts to write to this drive could blow it away forever.

The good news, though, was that Dan felt that 99.9% of the data was recoverable and that the unrecoverable part could be restored from the Linux distribution – it was operating system files, not my wife’s pictures. Hurray! Dan then faxed me the report (along with the authorization document – and bill – which I needed to send back so the recovery could commence). I particularly liked this one paragraph which stood out from the turgid prose that usually makes up laboratory reports:

“I am very pleased to confirm that, as a result of several hours of creative engineering investigation and examination, we have successfully determined the problems associated with your media and developed a strategy to access the data in question.”

How much more pleasant that sounds then the usual boilerplate, which might be in this case: “Send us $1,200 and we’ll send you your data.” That sounds more like a ransom note.

I agreed to the recovery, and Tuesday’s Federal Express run brought not only my NAS device, but also a box full of CDs with all of my wife’s pictures. They also included the operating system files, of course, but it was the original data we were so very pleased to see.

Had this been business-critical data, it could have been turned around in less than 24 hours. How much does your downtime cost you per hour?

Data recovery services aren’t cheap, and certainly, keeping adequate backups is less expensive. But when the backup fails – or doesn’t exist – data recovery is a whole lot less expensive than losing business.