Data Recovery When All Hope is Lost

By Greg McNevin

February 12th, 2007: There are many solutions to offer redundancy for data these days, and RAID arrays are one of the solutions being embraced by SMBs for storage peace of mind. However, while a RAID array will save you from a drive failure, it may not save your data from a natural disaster.

Thankfully, there are a number of companies sprouting up to rescue data even when it has been brought to the very brink of destruction. Should a fire (or in the case of Sydney this week a flood) rip through your organisation and toast your servers, all may not be lost.

Even if your RAID array has been reduced to a smouldering pile of melted plastic and metal data can still be saved by companies such as DriveSavers in the US and Sydney’s Payam Data Recovery.

The destroyed hardware is deconstructed and from there, DriveSavers for example will rebuild the disk drives from scratch using substitute parts. The make is matched and then in a clean room the original drive platters are rescued and re-set in a completely new drive, allowing the data extracted using recovery software.

It may sound like a bit of a magic trick, however, as data is stored on the physical disc, as long as the disc platters themselves do not sustain damage then the potential to recover data is always there.

So don’t write off your critical data too soon. Sometimes your information can be rescued from even the most dire circumstances.

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