Data Loss & Recovery

On Tuesday March 20th, 2007, the Associated Press reported a computer tech wiped out $38 billion dollars of account data for Alaska's Department of Revenue. The article reported that it would cost about $200,000 to re-key the data from their paper backups in over 300 boxes. This story is not uncommon, and data loss could cost more: it can put you out of business. For most home users, data loss means lousing address books, pictures, memories, resumes, check books, and music. While this probably is not catastrophic, some can never be recreated. For a business though, their data makes them more efficient: pulling something up in the computer and not having to pull a paper file. For some businesses, this data is critical. To determine how critical your data is, go a month without using is: do not open any existing documents, no computerized accounting, don't think about sending an email using your address book, and do not use Outlook in general. When your data is gone, it has gone to digital "La-La Land" to never return.

The Value of Data

When considering the value of your data, we have two routes: data recovery, and data re-creation. Data recovery for a single drive may cost from $750 - $3,500. A stripped RAID array with parity (RAID 3) would cost from $2,250 to $10,500. If data recovery is possibly, it might be worth considering.

The other method to recover data is to re-enter the data. This value could be determined by the amount you would pay staff to enter data. The quicker you need it, the more costly - over-time. Consider a company who louses a year of accounting data. The accounting department consists of 4 fulltime employees making $14 an hour. The cost to recreate this data would be approximately $112,000.

These estimates are for data that can be recovered. Sometimes data recovery is not an option, and the data is lost. Unlike on the TV series CSI and 24, data is not always recoverable. In preparation for this type of disaster, you might consider what data cannot be recreated, or the cost to recreate exceeds your means. Backing up data is not just important, but critical. The cost to recreate the data, the time required recreating data, and the loss to efficiency can strangle an organization.

Considering the cost to get your data back, you should be prepared to lose it. Backup any data you cannot go without. In all likelihood, these backups will be the difference between having this data, and having to go without this data.

[This is the first part of a series of articles covering data loss, backups, and interrelated topics encountered by Internetwork Consulting.]

Shawn Zernik
Lead Technician
Internetwork Consulting

Data Recovery And File Recovery Tools

Data recovery is used when serious situations and accidents occur to your system, like when hard drives has been formatted, or if you accidentally delete a file that you really need, which is no impossible, or it can also be used when a virus enters your system and deletes some of your files and information. The great thing is that any data recovery software works sufficiently with most computers and operating systems.

You can use data recovery software to recover information from your local hard drive, your extra hard drive, a floppy disk, a removable or portable hard drive, memory cards, and in most cases you could even use it to recover information from old CD?s. In addition a hard drive crash is no match for data recovery software. The other great thing is that you will be able to recover basically every piece of information that was on you hard drive like your email messages, video files, music and photos and obviously your data files and documents.

There are two main ways of retrieving lost data using a data recovery software, one being when the file you are retrieving has been recently deleted, the other option is to recover everything that has been on the hard disk and from there you find what you are looking for.

There are many different data recovery software programs you can use to recover your files; some of them even let you browse through your deleted files to see what you would like to retrieve. There are processes that can recover and restore your deleted files in seconds! Once the data has been recovered from you hard drive you have the option to either save it to another folder on a different hard drive or storage device, or you can burn it directly to CD. Once your files have been successfully recovered by the data recovery software, all your information stays the same, which is to say that nothing will have been changed, even in the event of a virus overload, the file names and all the date will still be in tact.

Your lost files can be restored in one click and they can be stored by name, size or date of saving. A search session also gets saved to a disk file that is used later for reloading so that the drive will not need to be scanned again, which makes the restoration process so much easier and quicker.

Majority of the data recovery software programs are offered as free demo version. You can easily download the software from the internet and try how it works.

Sam is CEO of data recovery and file recovery utilities.

Good Things To Know About Raid Data Recovery

When it comes to the recovery of data from a hard disk, the best option for any firm is to use the Raid data recovery method. It is a very complex process that tries to repair the damage done by the client before sending the hard disk to the data recovery firm. It is never advisable for a user to try and recover the data himself. These clients may use certain system utilities tools in order to repair the array, but they may very often cause even more trouble. And, as when things go bad, they usually do when the data is critical, these hard disks should be directly taken to a firm that is specialized in data recovery. For example, previous happenings have showed that, when a RAID failure occurs and results in the loss of important data, somebody?s job is on the line! If the data is not recovered, then things get quite complicated, for the employee, as well as for the employer.

Therefore, the best action you can take in the situation of a Raid data recovery problem is to immediately send the hard disk to a specialized firm. Should a serious system failure occur, the whole pressure is transferred to the hard disk data recovery professionals. As the users are in the habit of starting troubleshooting processes in order to solve the problem, the data recovery experts must also repair the damage done by these processes, as they can make the data impossible to recover. The information involved in such a situation can cost many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars in labor and resources to create. This is the reason why the executives are not at all interested in finding out the cause of the failure, they just care about the fact that the server has crashed and that the problem must be immediately solved.

It is true that the Raid data recovery process can be pretty expensive, but in most cases it is nothing compared to trying to recreate the data that has been destroyed. Not to speak about the fact that getting the data back could be enough to save someone's job!

The procedures that Raid data recovery consists of start by making sure all of the drives are properly functioning. This may mean taking the physically damaged drives into the clean room and try to make all the necessary repairs, in order for them to normally function again. The hard disk data recovery technician then initiates a very low-level process that allows him to work around bad sectors of the disk. It is in fact making complete sector-by-sector clones of every drive. The original source drive is being put in a "write protect" mode, in order to protect the existing data during the cloning process. The actual recovery process is performed on these cloned copies!

There are many elements that dictate the high price of the Raid data recovery process: the file system, the total size of the damaged drives and the situation of failure. Therefore, the best thing you can do is avoid the damage and a job loss by backing up your data!

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