Data Recovery Case Studies

Remote Data Recovery at an Airport

One and a half hours before take-off, a businesswoman's laptop was returned to her after a routine maintenance check by her IT department. It contained her Powerpoint presentation, crucial to the meeting she was meant to be attending. While rebooting for a final run-through in the departure lounge, a message appeared saying the boot sector was corrupt. Not knowing any better when she was asked whether she wanted to fix it, she said yes, and in the process lost her presentation. Desperately needing to catch her flight, but all in vain without the presentation, she called Southwest Stars and agreed to attempt remote data recovery then and there. As the final call for boarding went out, Southwest Stars Data Recovery engineers fixed the problem and recovered the presentation, allowing the business woman to board the plane as planned.

Laboratory Data Recovery: Flood in Texas

The common assumption that water and technology don't mix was dispelled recently when a Houston-based business had seen the recent bad weather flood their entire ground floor office in sea water. With a potential loss of the newly formulated HIPPA-compliant company accounts and 4 years worth of work, employees were desperate to retrieve the files. Having seen other companies' efforts fail, the hard drive was sent to Southwest Stars Data Recovery's highly skilled engineers to investigate. The result was a 100% recovery, a full guarantee for retrieval of over 30,000 files and a very happy customer.

Recovering a RAID 5 system on site.

A power outage can sometimes have catastrophic consequences on IT equipment, even the most refined of them. This happened to a big Austin financial holding company. Power cut, faulty UPS.... the RAID controller of one of their RAID 5 server ended up being damaged. As a result, the logical structure of the RAID was damaged. This was a disaster for the company as the 16 drive server was used to store very confidential information on its top customers. The critical and confidential nature of the information stored on the server made it vital for the company not only to recover its data but to have it done without the equipment leaving its premises. The IT director decided to contact Southwest Stars Data Recovery and asked about our on-site services. A team of highly experienced engineers was sent to the company premises. The recovery procedure was explained to the director. At the same time, the engineers carried out their work imaging the drives individually, simulating and rebuilding the RAID structure and recovering all the data, in a matter of just a couple of hours. The customer's system was up and running in no time and all the relevant departments were able to access the top customer information and purchase details.

Giving a Healthcare Provider New Life

A small, independent, integrated healthcare delivery system had one of their Pharmacy/Laboratory servers crash, leaving them without data important for high quality, safe patient care. They discovered the crash the previous evening, but thought the situation was manageable since they had backups available. Unfortunately, the most recent backups were corrupt leaving them with the option of restoring previous backups with data that was 48 hours old - a situation that would have been catastrophic for the small company. At that point, they decided to call Southwest Stars to find out about their option for data recovery. Southwest Stars diagnosed the problem and found that the data was there and most likely recoverable, but the drive was logically bound to other physical drives in the server, making it necessary to have the whole server recovered to continue. Southwest Stars let the company know that if they found another clean, matching drive, Southwest Stars could copy the data to it successfully and get it back to them. The company searched, found and shipped a drive to Southwest Stars, who got their data copied to the new drive and shipped back to them in record time. Only 24 hours later, the company had the new drive in their possession and all of their data up to the time of the crash.