HD Doctor Blog

When a data loss occurs on something as valuable as a server, it is essential to the life of your business to get back up and running as soon as possible.

Here is a sampling of specific types of disasters accompanied with actual engineering notes from recent Remote Data Recovery jobs:

Causes of partition/volume/file system corruption disasters:
•    Corrupted file system due to system crash
•    File system damaged to automatic volume repair utilities
•    File system corruption due partition/volume resizing utilities
•    Corrupt volume management settings

Case study
Severe damage to partition/volume information to Windows 2000 workstation; had used 3rd party recovery software – didn’t work, reinstalled OS but was looking for 2nd partition/volume, found it…

Possible causes of hardware related disasters:
•    Server hardware upgrades (storage controller firmware, BIOS, RAID firmware)
•    Expanding storage array capacity by adding larger drives to controller
•    Failed array controller
•    Failed drive on storage array
•    Multiple failed drives on storage array
•    Storage array failure but drives are working
•    Failed boot drive
•    Migration to new storage array system

Case study
Netware volume server, Traditional NWFS, failing hard drive made volume inaccessible; Netware would not mount volume. Errors on hard drive were not in the data area and drive was still functional. Copied all of the data to another volume; 100% recovery.
Evaluation time: 1 hour

Causes of…

Successful server recoveries: Preventing further damage when a server goes down

Despite the industry improvements in backup systems or storage array systems, server failures are a common occurrence that can leave a business paralyzed. Whether the failure is hardware-related, software-related, the result of human error or due to a natural disaster, the number of data loss events is increasing as businesses rely on their corporate server structure and document storage volumes.

How to increase the chances of a successful recovery:

•    Use a volume defragmenter regularly: A defragmenter moves the pieces of each file or folder to one location on the volume, so that each occupies a single, contiguous space on the disk drive. This helps improve the quality…

Every IT professional can tell a horror story about an upgrade, roll-out, or migration gone awry. So many factors are involved; hardware, software, compatibility, timing, data, procedures, security protocols, and of course the well-meaning but imperfect human.

Over 2008, IT departments and staff can look forward to a number of upgrade projects for their computer system infrastructure. According to Gartner, Inc., the number of PC shipments during fourth quarter 2007 increased 13.1% over the same period in 2006. Global PC shipments during 2007 increased 13.4% over 2006 – equating to 271.2 million units in 2007.

While a slower economy than in previous years may lower the number of units, the fact that organizations have been investing in new units shows…

There are a number of financial planning exercises that can help you determine if capital expenses for PC hardware with complete parts and service contracts for the life of the unit are best suited for your IT infrastructure.

Alternatively, leased IT equipment may be more cost effective and would assist in maintaining a more comprehensive IT equipment life-cycle program.

As we dig further into this topic, you will see that hardware and software deployment planning is just the start of discussion for the IT group. Migration planning raises more questions than answers and these questions start with equipment and software life-cycle management. For example, planning discussions can start with these questions:

•    What is your IT department’s roadmap for equipment…

Planning for a migration
Planning for product life-cycles necessitates an implementation strategy. Migration of computer systems has evolved from the manual process of a complete rebuild and then copying over the data files to an intelligent method of transferring the settings of a particular system and then the data files.

Many IT professionals can attest to the fact that there is a large investment in time and fine tuning of new servers. Whether it’s complexity of domain controllers, user and group policies, security policies, operating system patches, and additional services to users – all of these require time to set up. Fine tuning the server after the rollout can be time consuming as well. Once completed, a computer system administrator…

Migration disaster-recovery options
Even the best planning for any deployment can result in disaster for users and critical data. In order to be completely prepared, include data recovery planning within your plan. Questions for your team to ask are:

•    How do we handle an unexpected event during the deployment process?
•    Do we have enough break-points within the automation to catch errors?
•    Can a backup be performed before the deployment?
•    How much time or resources would it take to recover from migration disaster?
•    What alternatives do we have if there is a hardware failure during the migration?
•    What data recovery vendors do we have relationships with that can get…