Typical Scenarios of Server Data Catastrophes

Southwest Stars Data Recovery Services is an undisputed leader in the data recovery industry with the most technologically superior data recovery resolutions available. We have been serving customers globally for nearly 20 years with clean rooms, engineers, and employees located around the world. During that time, we have seen hundreds of data loss situations ranging from commonplace to exceptional.

When data loss happens on something as important as a server, it is vital to the life of your business to get back up and running as soon as possible. Southwest Stars Data Recovery’s experience and technology can recover data from systems ranging from legacy and post-mainframe storage devices to the latest high-end SANs.

Here are examples of detailed types of problems accompanied with actual engineering notes from recent Data Recovery jobs:

Causes of Partition/Volume/File System Corruption Disasters

• Corrupt volume management settings
• File system damaged to automatic volume repair utilities
• File Corrupted File System due to system crash
• System corruption due partition/volume resizing utilities

Case Study

Extensive damage to partition/volume information to Windows XP workstation; customer had used 3rd party recovery software--didn't work, reinstalled OS but was looking for 2nd partition/volume, found it and it was a 100% recovery.

Evaluation Time: 46 minutes (Evaluation time represents the time it takes to evaluate the problem, make necessary file system changes to access data, and to report on all of the directories and files that can be recovered)

Causes of Specific File Error Disasters

• Corrupted industry system database; file system is in good health
• Corrupted message database; file system is all right
• Corrupted user files

Case Study

Windows 2000 server, volume repair tool damaged file system; target directories unavailable. Complete access to original files critical. Southwest Stars Data Recovery safely repaired volume; restored original data, 100% recovery.

Evaluation Time: 20 Minutes

Exchange 2000 server, severely damaged and corrupt Information store; corruption cause unknown. Southwest Stars Data Recovery Technician Scanned Information Store file for valid user mailboxes, results took up to 48 hours due to the corruption. Backup was one month old/not valid for users.

Evaluation Time: 96 Hours (1.5 days)

Possible Causes of Hardware Related Disasters

• Server hardware upgrades (Storage Controller Firmware, BIOS, RAID Firmware)
• Expanding Storage Array capacity by adding larger drives to controller
• Failed Array Controller
• Failed drive on Storage Array
• Multiple failed drives on Storage Array
• Storage Array failure but drives are working
• Failed boot drive
• Migration to new Storage Array system

Case Study

Netware volume server, Traditional NWFS, failing hard drive made volume inaccessible; Netware would not mount volume. Errors on hard drive were not in the data area and drive was still functional. Copied all of the data to another volume; 100% recovery.

Evaluation Time: 1 hour