Rescue Me
Rescue Me p>
Despite living in an age of heightened vigilance over the importance of storing data and keeping it easily accessible, there is still not enough insurance in the business world to recover that data once it has been lost. Unless you have recovery specialists close by. By Rodney Appleyard.
Data recovery specialists have the capacity to rescue a manager of any small, medium-sized or even enterprise business from the edge of despair, when they experience a situation where they realise that important data has been lost or deleted from their system. The impact can be seriously damaging, often resulting in the loss of substantial revenue.
Recognising the potentially critical blow that such an occurrence can cause a business, CBL Data Recovery have set up hospital style recovery centres, where they work on sick hard drives and have them operated on by a skilled team of technicians, dressed in white lab coats, who bring the data back to life.
These recovery facilities are dotted around the world and guarantee quick and cost-effective data retrievement in any media, system or business. The regions include Canada, North America, Northern Europe, UK, Germany, Australia, Brisbane, Singapore and Beijing, with the Sydney facility the latest to open its doors. Scientists in all of these offices are also linked together via video cameras, so that they can see each other whilst they consult over how to fix each system.
Digital data can be lost in a variety of ways. Seventy-eight percent of these failures occur due to a hardware or system malfunction; 11 percent are because of human error; seven percent are a result of software corruption or programme malfunction; two percent crash because of computer viruses; one percent fail after natural disasters and one percent malfunction due to water or fire.
Ninety-nine out of 100 hard drives will experience no problem, but there is always the rogue one which might have something wrong with it which causes the data to be lost. Even the manufacturers themselves say that 1.2 to 1.5 percent of all hard drives will develop a fault, out of 200 million hard drives which are sold worldwide each year. That translates into around 2.5 million hard drives that will develop a fault each year.When we consider that data is now being stored in smaller spaces, meaning that today's hard drives store 500 times the data stored on the drives 10 years ago, then the loss of data is also more significant.
With more mission critical data-hospital patient records, graduate school thesis', personal finance, tax information and payroll records-being stored electronically, the loss of such data can have staggering financial, legal and productivity implications for organisations.
Major vendors do not currently provide recovery services for lost data, only hardware fixes, which is why a company such as CBL can be a lifeline, especially for smaller businesses that may only have one form of back-up. CBL technicians can handle all sizes of hard drives installed in single or multi-disc configurations, no matter what system it operates on.
They also have the expertise to deal with corporate Enterprise Storage Systems such as RAIDs, SANs, NASs and magnetic tapes.
Their technical specialists can recover data quickly and cost effectively in hours, when it used to take days and even weeks.
Enterprise information assets are very vulnerable, as despite the costs of enterprise loss, as many as 50 percent of companies have not deployed intrusion detection systems, and fewer still have authentication procedures, making them vulnerable to attack.
Guy Riddle, Manager of CBL Data Recovery in Sydney, explains the common problem businesses face when they don't back up their data.
"People ask "why not go to the backup" when their data is lost. But few companies have an effective disaster recovery or backup strategies in place that works. We don't try to prevent disasters; we just rescue the backup stage. Companies will always try to backup from a tape and they hope it will all go smoothly, without the tape being chewed up for instance.
"Even though recording formats have evolved over the years, they still run the risk of losing data. The music industry dropped cassettes like a hot potato as soon as CDs became commercially sound. People moved away from VHS cassettes because the quality was poor and tapes would often get chewed up. The problem being that you have to clean the heads regularly to stop the tape from being corrupted. You see, these tapes have working parts and you have to make sure the wheels keep going around, otherwise you lose the quality. How many times have people had their cassette in their car, only to have it chewed up when they try to eject it?"
"The problem with CDs," adds Riddle, "is that they can only hold a relatively small amount of data, and this is not good for corporate backup. However, DVD burners are becoming more viable than CDs. As technology develops, more backup strategies will get better and better. But even these can develop faults. As for now, some of our requests are about tapes screwing up, getting mangled as people try to store it, and when they put it back in the drive, the drive won't recognise it. But the good news is that we can recover data from any media, be it hard drive, CD, DVD floppy drive, USPJs, even flash memory from different cameras. We have lots of computer systems set-up and machines that can read flash memory, floppy disks, servers, laptop drives, and PC desktop drives, such as jazz drives and disc drive."
Even if the hardware is damaged, they can still read the data by applying specially developed software to read the binary code and translate it back into a form readable to the user. They make sure all of the ones and zeros are put back together so that data makes sense again.
"What you find in big corporate enterprises is that there are back-up data recovery systems, but these companies don't manage the data inside the laptops," says Riddle. "They assume that each user will copy the data onto the server. The user thinks the IT department will store it on the server and the IT department expects the user to store it on the server. However, when the computer crashes, neither know how to recover the data from the C drive. But we can recover that too."
Many companies have already benefited from CBL's service. One salesman at an IT company was fired from his job and decided to delete all of the crucial company information available on his laptop. They had to carry out a forensic job to recover the data for the company, but they got it all back in the end.
Another person took his whole family around Europe and captured about 200 digital photographs, before copying as many a he could onto his laptop. He then had a hard drive failure on his laptop. The data was eventually recovered from the flash card camera. In another instance, a band accidentally had all of their demos over the last 3-4 years deleted from their hard disk. They thought they had lost all of that work forever, until CBL brought it back to life.
Mike Jarvis, the managing director of Oasys Software, which provides Computer Aided Design (CAD) and document management software, lost 3 months worth of accounts information.
"Our hard drive with accounts information on it just died," recalls Jarvis. "My wife does the accounts and it would have set her back three months to type all of that information in again, plus it happened near to the time when we were due to report our GST information to the tax office. If it wasn't for CBL recovering the data in a couple of weeks, we would have had to waste so much time gathering that information again and retyping it in, losing a lot of ground on the business in the process. But as it happens, we didn't have to do anything, other than pay $1500 dollars for CBL to recovery it very quickly. It also saved my wife from going crazy!"
CBL plans to align themselves with the big vendors, such as HP, IBM and Dell, so that they can offer a ready built-in data recovery insurance plan when computers are sold worldwide. That way, in the future, customers will be able to have their data recovered as quickly as their hardware is fixed.
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