by: Ken Roberts
Data Recovery is not Disaster Recovery - contrary to popular belief. Ask somebody what data recovery is, and nine times out of ten the response is, "backup". Thinking the question is too vague, I set out to ask a better one: "What is the difference between disaster recovery and data recovery?"
Technicians, you'll love this one...
When speaking to a group of corporate executives - while attending the world's largest technology conference in Germany - I opened the discussion by asking them to define their data recovery strategy on a piece of paper in thirty seconds. Some of the answers were mind-boggling. The most popular one: "backup server". The most honest: "I don't know, our IT department handles that." And the most ridiculous: "We don't have this problem."
The data recovery dog and pony show...
One man came forward and said, "I've lost some data that I need to present at a talk tomorrow. Do you think you could help me out?". After listening to all the...I can't believe what I am hearing, I thought of an idea: Recover this guy's files right here in front of everybody, and they will get a first-hand experience of what data recovery is. So, I canned my speech on Implementing Effective Data Recovery Strategies.
Everybody raised their hands when asking them if they would like to see a demonstration of data recovery. I stated that, 'This man - Herb from South Africa - has lost some data that he needs for tomorrow, and that I will first attempt to recover some of it.
Smiles, chuckles, and laughter...
Luckily, all of Herbs pictures were recovered. In fact, the data recovery went so well that many more pictures he had lost were recovered too, but I did not know it at that moment. I asked Herb if I could do a slide show of what I recovered. Slide one: A mind-map laying out his presentation for tomorrow. The next few slides: Details of slide one. Then came the pictures that roared down the house. Let's say that Herb was revealed in a way I cannot discuss here.
What is data recovery?
What the executives learned is that data recovery is your last resort to recover lost data after every possible backup method has failed - while disaster recovery is implementing a comprehensive data backup plan, so that when data is lost, you simply access the backup server or a local storage device, like a USB key, to retrieve your lost file.
Herb made his presentation on the airplane on the way to the show, but failed to back it up. He thought saving then to his laptop hard drive was good enough. In this case, he was not able to access his files because his computer would not boot to the desktop. So, data recovery software was used to access the computer, and then to reconstruct the file system, so that the data could be recovered to another storage medium to be used again by Herb.
Data recovery is a multi-billion dollar business...
The data recovery industry would be bankrupt if everybody would have a complete backup plan. But every day without fail, we get calls from people like Herb who are intelligent and run multi-million and billion dollar companies who have lost their data. Our advice: Backup your work - and not to the computer you are using. And then confirm it, because failure is quite common. Finally, make sure you use the Disk Defragmenter function regularly, so that if you do encounter a situation where data recovery becomes inevitable, the success rate will increase substantially.
You can find more written, audio and video information discussing the data recovery industry at ACR Data Recovery. Ken Roberts has been developing data recovery software and performing data recovery services worldwide for over 15 years.
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