December 23
In the spirit of the holidays this year, we decided to take a look back at some of the data recovery issues from yesteryear, our own Ghosts of Recoveries Past!
In ye olde Olden Dayes, saw we challenges diverse and frightful. But as technology has changed, grown and matured, and computers and users have become increasingly sophisticated, some of the most dire threats to our data have all but disappeared, and we thought we’d take a moment to reminisce.
CBL opened for business in 1993, just a year after the dreaded “Michelangelo” virus was supposed to doom computers forever. Now we have to think, when’s the last time we saw a project in for recovery due to virus damage? Today’s virii are almost more annoyances than dangers, comprising a mix of malware and nuisance. Of course, we still see some of the fallout: a failed cleaning turned into a full system re-format or re-imaging that then requires logical recovery services. Remember, keep your anti-virus software up-to-date!
Another challenge from the past may turn into a new challenge for the future. In terms of “modern” hard drives, IDE (or more technically ATA) drives had a large degree of built-in intelligence, making the practice of labeling a new drive with geometry details and defect mapping obsolete. But as our appetite for data grew, so did the capacities of our hard drives. Unfortunately, our computers and operating systems sometimes had trouble keeping pace. Early IDE drives were limited to 540 MB of addressable space. As drives slowly crept up to this limit, and eventually passed it, our rather large investments into the computers of the day weren’t always up to the challenge of “upgrading,” a newish concept in the world of personal computing. While Bill Gates’ Windows 95 could handle a massive 2GB of space, our computers could only “see” 528 MB of drive size. Luckily, third-party software layers came around to handle this little detail for us. The specific problem had been solved, but only as a temporary stop-gap: as demands and sizes increased, so too were the limits pushed back. First 540 MB BIOS limits, then a 2 GB partition size limit, to an 8 GB BIOS limit, to a 32GB partition limit.. Well, we finally set the capacity bar so high it’s taken almost 10 years to reach it. (stay tuned for Recoveries Future as we cross the 2 TB limit). Many times we would see projects come in for recovery where users were locked out of their data as they upgraded older systems only to face a mismatch of BIOS capability and drive capacity, with a dash of translation software thrown in for good measure. Remember, backup your data before making big changes to your critical systems!
Speaking of arbitrary limits, here’s another gem we just don’t see anymore. Introduced in 1997, Microsoft Outlook has become the corporate email/calendar/manager standard. Way back in those dim days of ’97, we weren’t too far away from when Windows itself had a 2 GB partition limit, so it’s no surprise really that Outlook would come fixed with this same limit for it’s database file. Really, back then who could imagine having 2 GB worth of email? So what happened? Users would continue happily forwarding jokes from Aunt Betty and checking their coworkers’ calendars until one day their Outlook simply went out on them. As the PST database hit 2 GB, Outlook would simply fail with no prior warning. Almost all projects we saw were recoverable, but it took 6 years for Microsoft to fix the problem. Remember, regular backups of business-crucial data means you only lose the data since the last backup. Do it often!
Tthe past is sometimes fun to re-visit. There are a lot of lessons, sometimes hard ones, learned over many years. Got any special memories of your own of techno-challenges of yore? We’d love to hear them!
Category: data recovery
Tags: causes of lost data, christmas, data disaster, data recovery, holidays, lost data
