Having access to the most up-to-date business information is vital to any business. That is why you should back up your data regularly. Data backup and data recovery are major ingredients of any business continuity plan. Do you regularly back up vital business information? Not? Well, maybe hard drive recovery may save the day for you after all, should the worst thing happen: your hard drive crashes or is destroyed when you most need it. That is when hard drive repair may come to your rescue.
Backup or recovery?
In a previous post Will your business byte the dust? I described the importance of data backup. Nonetheless, even if you do back up your data, sometimes the data you need to access in case of a disaster hasn’t yet been backed up. Or a file is simply corrupted and cannot be read. Or it has been accidentally deleted. That’s when data recovery comes into play.
Wikipedia describes data recovery as:
the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally
However, as I said in my previous post Will your business byte the dust?
Before you splurge on whatever technology has to offer, keep in mind that you need a tool that is in line with the value of the data to your business […] it does not make sense to implement a solution that will allow a full recovery in days when you need hours or minutes.
One of the crucial factor in business continuity is the recovery time objective RTO that Wikipedia describes as
the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
The The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management offers considerable insights on this and other matters in business continuity management.
Hard Drive Repair
That said, what tools are available for hard drive recovery and how do you go about it? This PC World Article About DTI put me on the track to DIT, one of many companies that do Hard Drive Recovery.
As it happens, one of the most common failures in hard drives is so-called head failure or degradation, signified by clicking or any other strange sounds coming from the hard drive, and if the hard drive is run too long in this degraded state it can make data unrecoverable at times. I didn’t know that, but in this case, hard drive repair is relatively easy.
DTI appears to be so sure of their recovery abilities in Hard Drive Repair that they offer a ‘no cure, no pay’ solution. ‘If we can’t fix it, we won’t charge you’. Admittedly, in the computer world, under normal circumstances, nothing is ever ‘deleted’, and can usually be fully or partially retrieved, given the right set of tools.
Need to know more?
I’m sure there are other places, too, but I found the resource center at dtidata.com a very helpful site in understanding hard drive failures and hard drive recovery techniques. You’d better be somewhat more technically inclined than I am to gain the full benefit from their writing, but there are some posts for the lay person like Restore Deleted Emails In Outlook Express or How To Remove Unwanted Software From Windows XP.
In addition, the DTI site also offers a selection of free data recovery software, even a floppy disk data recovery tool, for those still using such ‘antiquated’ data storage.
DTIData is only one of many specialists in hard drive recovery and hard drive repair, but it’s the company I happened to read about this weekend. If you have other preferences, please feel free to share them with me.
Links
- blogs.pcworld.com: Hard Drive Gone?
- dtidata.com: Hard Drive Recovery
