Forgot to schedule that important backup and lost all your data? Find out how the person you call when it goes pear shaped spends their day in this diary of a data recovery expert by Adrian Briscoe, General Manager – Asia Pacific, Kroll Ontrack
8:15 am – I can hear the phone ringing as I walk from the stairs to my office. Someone’s looking for an early start to the day. I rush to get it but miss the call. I make a coffee instead.
8:25 am – A quick hit of caffeine and I’m ready to take on the world. I check the phone messages. It’s a disturbingly familiar story. Small business plans a routine overnight systems upgrade but something goes haywire and the computer system crashes. When the IT guys get it working again, they discover that their tape backup seems to have failed and they’ve lost three days worth of business data. The managing director wants to know: Can I help? It’s urgent. He gives me an address and I agree to meet him in just over half an hour’s time.
8:55 am – I pull up at their factory. It’s in one of the older inner city suburbs. Small but well established.
9:00 am– I’m met by the MD and his IT manager. They detail the problem. All their transactions for the past 72 hours have been lost. Supply chain records, customer orders, the lot. It’s the busiest time of year for them and it’s a massive blow.
9.15 am – We discuss the process of recovery and I explain just how much we can get back these days – from hard drives, back ups and from storage. I tell them their tape drive has most likely corrupted or there may be physical damage to the tape due to its age. Either way, there’s a good chance we can recover it. A look of relief crosses their faces.
9:45 am – I take the tape back to my office where we have a dust-free clean room. Here it will be dismounted, examined and processed. It will take 24 hours, but we should be able to create a copy ready for tomorrow morning. The MD is ecstatic but I’ve no time to celebrate. My next call has come in.
11:00 am – A client’s email server has gone down, taking with it all the international orders that had come into the company overnight. It’s a potentially expensive delay but not a complete loss. We talk about the options before I arrange to get an engineer onsite to start recovering the data.
12:30 pm – I’m thinking about lunch when I get a call from my brother-in-law. He runs a small architectural business on the other side of town. I usually only ever hear from him or see him around Christmas. He tells me his laptop is making strange grinding noises. Should he be worried, he asks.
I ask him when he last backed up the data and I can almost hear him shuffling his feet at the other end of the phone. I decide not to hold back. I tell him it sounds bad and ask him to turn the machine off immediately. We talk through the potential issues and I warn him not to restart the laptop or to try re-installing software. Once you get that blue screen of death, strange noises or any kind of unresponsiveness on a laptop, any further operation only risks damaging the data.
He agrees to drop the laptop in at our service centre. With any luck, providing he hasn’t tried to remove or handle the hard drive, or used any file recovery utility, I’m hopeful we can recover all his files.
1:00 pm – Lunch continues to call but it looks like I’m going to have to wait. Another call comes in. This time it’s a marketing executive whose Blackberry has crashed. It sounds like a power-related problem. I calm the caller down with assurances that the data is still retrievable and arrange for the device to be brought in to our service centre.
1:45 pm – There’s a lull in the proceedings so I take the opportunity to go and grab a sandwich.
2:30 pm – I’ve barely returned when I get a call from the IT coordinator at another client organisation. It’s a straightforward and surprisingly common problem. She needs to retrieve files that were deleted from a desktop hard drive. This one’s a cinch. I point her in the direction of Ontrack EasyRecovery software which will allow her to recover such files for herself, any time she needs to.
3.45 pm – Another call. This time a disgruntled employee has encrypted his files before walking out the door. The company can’t read or access them and needs help. Fortunately problems like this can be handled remotely over the Internet. It’s a particularly fast solution as there’s no need to ship physical computer equipment anywhere. My contact breathes a sigh of relief and I start organising the recovery.
5.00 pm – It’s quiet so I clean up some paperwork and make a few calls to check on the progress of today’s earlier jobs. The tape recovery is looking positive and the onsite engineer has just returned from restoring data from the email server. Unfortunately my brother-in-law’s laptop has some unreadable sectors and he won’t be getting all his data back. I make a mental note to get him some backup software next Christmas, then turn off the PC, grab my coat and turn out the lights. It’s been a busy day.
