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Backing Up and Recovering From Disaster!
Recently I’ve spent a significant amount of time
recovering a few clients from data loss due to different problems. Two of the
data losses were due to viruses and another from a hard drive failure. One of
the virus-infected clients and the client with the hardware failure experienced
total data loss. Since this month’s issue covers viruses, I thought it would
be appropriate to remind everyone to make sure they have been making good
backups and that they are prepared for disaster. The physical hardware costs for
disaster recovery isn’t near as expensive as the labor costs involved in
restoring the system and recovering the data. Even having good backups of your
data doesn’t preclude the reinstallation of your operating system software and
some software applications. Even reinstalling your software from CD or disks
doesn’t include having to download all of the latest and greatest patches to
those applications and installing them as well. A boot sector virus infected the client’s main hard drive
that was infected with a virus. The virus corrupted the File Allocation Table
(FAT) and rendered the PC unusable. The virus was installed on the machine by an
infected floppy disk brought home from school and left in the machine’s floppy
drive when the system was booted. The virus on the infected floppy installed
itself onto the hard drive’s boot sector and began wreaking havoc on the
machine on the next boot up. The client didn’t have a very recent backup and
it was extremely important to recover some of the documents that were lost if
possible. The final solution to recovering the documents was to send
the hard drive to Symantec’s data recovery service since the basic Norton
Utilities software could not recover the data. The cost was approximately $800
or so for a rush recovery service. This data recovery wasn’t nearly as
expensive as the client that had the hard drive failure. Typically hard drives
fail due to a stepper motor, drive motor or circuit board component failure. The
client’s tape backup hadn’t been working for a few months and was planning
on getting new tapes and cleaning the drive to get their backups working again.
However, this hadn’t been done yet and so the tape backups they did have were
fairly old. Therefore the hard drive was sent in for evaluation for data
recovery to OnTrack Data Recovery Services. The cost to analyze the hard drive
was $200, and the cost to recover the data ranged between $1000 - $3500
depending on how much data was recovered and the difficulty in recovering that
data. Unfortunately, analysis of the hard drive showed a physical failure of the
media and rendered the drive unrecoverable. Therefore, the best next option was
to recover their data from the latest tape backup. This was not an ideal
recovery situation, but recovering thousands of older documents was much better
than recovering nothing. On the positive side though, the client had been told
how to make backups of their accounting data to local hard drives on their
network and so this data was only one day old. Prior to restoring data on a system, a new drive has to be
installed to replace the failed drive, the server software has to be reinstalled
and all of the user accounts and privileges need to be recreated depending on
the capabilities of your backup software. It also includes reinstalling
additional server based applications that were previously running on the system
as well. Some preventive measures can be put in place to help reduce
down times such as mirrored or duplexed hard drives. This is where a second hard
drive is installed into the system and is used to mirror or copy the primary
hard drive. In the case when one of the two hard drives in the system fails, the
remaining hard drive keeps running until the system is shutdown and the bad hard
drive replaced. Several years ago this was a costly option for smaller budget
operations but has become much more affordable due to the drop in hard drive
prices. Therefore, even if you have a server up and running at this time but it
doesn’t have any of the drives mirrored it might be a good time to consider
the cost of having this done. The reduced cost of recovery using mirrored drives
can greatly offset the time it takes to reinstall and recover the operating
system on a server using a tape backup. Suggestions for checking your latest backups is to open
your latest backup in whatever backup tool you use and look for date/time stamps
on files that you know are updated daily and see what is stamped on your
backups. If the dates don’t look to be the most recent dates start making a
backup and make sure it is working. It’s always a good idea to use a different
set of tapes or media that can be overwritten without destroying your latest
backups as well. My final comments of this article are to immediately go
check your latest backups and make sure that they are working properly. Always
think about what might happen if that, worst case data loss scenario happened to
you or your company. Recovering your system and getting back up and running can
be a costly and time-consuming affair even if you do have good backups. You can
never be too prepared for disaster. Rich Simpson is president of Mind’s Eye, Inc., a software development and IT consulting firm. He has a degree in aerospace engineering and has been designing and developing custom and commercial database applications since 1986. For more information or to download software demos visit their web site at http://www.mindseyeinc.com or send e-mail to rsimpson@mindseyeinc.com or call 636-282-2102. |
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