Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan - Could Your Business
Go Under?

Has your company got an effective data center disaster recovery plan? How will you cope if disaster strikes and how will you go about data recovery if the worst case scenario does happen?

Server disasters don't necessarily mean that all your data has been lost, but the amount of data saved will depend on how you go about data center disaster recovery, the best advice is to use a specialist recovery service that has expert knowledge of server recovery.

The chances are that hardware or software failures will strike when you least expecting them to, and normally at your busiest time, through either to much pressure or lack of time to create a complete backup copy.

One intrinsic problem with modern technology is that it can give the impression of being flawless and reliable. This makes people complacent and unconcerned to the possibility and likelihood of a disaster ever striking.

Have you got an action plan in place?

There are many ways that you or your organization can reduce the stress and anxiety involved after a system failure, provided the time has been taken to do the appropriate planning in advance. The first thing a company should do is invest in a disaster recovery planning guide, template and spend time following through and planning the company’s recovery strategy in fine detail. The time involved up front may seem like a waste but the value of carrying out a detailed plan that includes a full risk and impact assessment that will highlight vulnerable areas and will fall into place when needed will pay back tenfold if disaster strikes.

There are businesses every year that consequently shut down because they failed to understand the operational impact that a system outage would have. Many businesses have a vague data center disaster recovery plan in place, or simply neglect to test or review their old outdated recovery plan, ready for a real emergency situation.

Data Center Server image
Without including human or system operational problems, things like floods, lightening, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and cold weather can all have a disastrous effect on data storage. Hopefully it will never be needed, but if it is you’ll be thankful that you had a plan in place, because if your server crashes, the financial

losses incurred through lost time, lost data and productivity could be very costly indeed.

The knock-on effect can be inaccessible and irretrievable data that may takes weeks or months to restore, the thought of that should be enough to make anyone take some immediate action.

The transfer speed and performance capabilities of broadband, are now making online secure offsite data backup and recovery services more popular, this could be something a company could do to improve back up stability and reduce the chances of data loss from both data tape or disk storage.

When a little knowledge can be dangerous

When it comes to a system crash many businesses will try to restore as much data as possible using hard drive recovery software and recovery programs or they may turn to computer antivirus software but in doing so, could, if due diligence is not taken, make the data recovery process more difficult and depending on the applications used and the initial problem, in the end could prevent a recovery engineer from saving your missing data.

Always be cautious when selecting recovery software, check that the program has NAS (network) capabilities, is it RAID friendly if you are using Raid array and is compatible with your Windows or Linux operating system.

If your server crashes or you have serious system failure and have not backed up your data then your first call of action should be with a professional recovery specialists experienced in advanced recovery solutions and hard drive recovery.

Reasons for failure

There are many reasons why a harddrive can fail, such as electronic failure, firmware failure, mechanical failure or logical failure but once your damaged media is in the hands of a recovery expert they will use their proven diagnostic methods in order to save as much data as possible. Their first step will be to test the functionality of the drives and assess whether there is any physical damage to the platters or not, provided the disks are intact and running they will do a complete disk recovery analysis report to give to you (normally free at this stage). After consultation and on your agreement they will make any necessary repairs in order for the drives to operate as normal again. If these repairs include internal component repair, the hard drive will be dismantled in a special class 100 clean room facility to ensure there is no extra contamination of the hard disk or components. Once the drives are running the first process is to make a complete copy of the disks and from those cloned copies the exact layouts of the volumes will be determined across the multiple drives. Sector by sector will be scrutinized to retrieve as much data as possible. Data recovery can be a complex process especially with RAID systems and in order to salvage as much data as possible the process is best left to an experienced data recovery expert.

Data recovery can be carried out on internal or external drives after power failure or spikes, water spills, dropped hard drives, RAID controller crashing, deleted files, accidental formatting (F-disking) or reconfiguration, poor or incorrect system booting, corrupt files, Spyware, Virus or Trojan horse or dirt contamination.

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Invest in a data center disaster
recovery plan and encourage staff and
management to be pro-active in
allowing time and resources to
carry out preparation in fine detail.

Appoint suitably qualified staff as
leaders and update the plan at
regular intervals.

A disaster recovery plan is worthless
unless it is tested regularly.

Hard Drive image

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