October 7
Get Your Disaster Plan together for Data Recovery
October is small business month and is a perfect time for organizations to consider a data recovery fire drill to ensure business continuity.
“Hard drives in your computer system are not fail-safe and can and will fail for numerous reasons,” says CBL’s president Bill Margeson. “Often those responsible for an organization’s IT may not be aware that one or more of the drives are acting up or about to go down causing major headaches for the business.”
To properly plan against a data loss crisis, running simulations now could prevent major headaches later. Some preparation tips are:
- Meet with team members and verbally walk-through scenarios and recovery plans
- Create a check-list; include emergency contact information, vendor contact numbers, staff instructions and any flowcharts
- Run a full simulation of failure, either hardware, software, environmental, etc. Emergency contacts can be called in, building services interrupted, staff disrupted to spot and identify any hiccups in your preparedness plan.
- Finally, a full-scale test can be run which actually does shut down critical servers or operations so that complete restore plans are enacted business-wide.
These drills will keep your staff sharp and ready and the entire organization trained in exactly what to do if or when you do experience a disaster situation.
The most common causes of hard drive failure are overheating, excessive vibration, power surges, poor quality of components and systemic damage such as failed firmware updates. If you have already experienced a disaster, CBL recommends following these steps to prevent further damage and data loss:
- Turn off the system. Avoid repeated resets and power-cycling
- Do not run volume repair or rebuild utilities on any drives in question
- Call a CBL emergency representative for help in determining next steps
- Remove the affected member drive(s) from the server and label each drive before providing to CBL
The most important thing: Don’t Panic. In most cases data is recoverable, but seeing the drives in as-close-to-the-original-failure state is critical to improving the chances of recovery. DIY software, CHKDSK, force-mounting a RAID can all cause additional damage or obfuscate the original issue. Contact a CBL specialist right away for specific advice to help you overcome this crisis.
Category: helpful hints, data loss prevention
Tags: business continuity plan, data recovery specialist, disaster recovery plan, disruption to business, raid array failure
Oct 13, 03:39 AM
Install a good data backup solution.