Lost Data? What NOT to Do and Why

Most users have experienced some form of data loss or the other. Several factors could account for data loss, the most obvious of which are ‘Act of God’-type calamities such as fire, water or physical damage. Fires occur for several reasons, most often carelessness. However, every critical data storage centre/office network should be adequately protected by a fire mitigation system. The most modern and advanced versions of these include inert-gas fire suppression systems, automatic fire-brigade calling tools and several other innovations; while these are expensive, no organisation that has a significant amount of data to protect can do without these. Damage from water is slightly harder to protect against, other than by adopting good infrastructure and ensuring competent, cutting construction for the office environment. This type of damage can come wearing several garbs: cyclones, hurricanes, floods, etc. can all cause one’s computer systems to become submerged in water. One particularly unlucky data manager came into work on Monday morning to find that a blocked toilet had flooded his office, leaving his data centre in five-inch-deep water! While fire damages data by directly disfiguring and warping the drive, water causes short circuits that render most electronic equipment useless.

Physical damage is another common reason for data loss: dropped laptops, for instance, often manifest data loss or corruption. The newest generation of mobile hard drives attempts to mitigate this risk by featuring hard drive heads that retract as soon as they sense a rapid acceleration, thus anticipating a fall, and avoiding damage to the ‘platter’, or actual disk. Earthquakes that result in falling cabinets, toppling drive arrays and other such chaos almost always cause data loss; less common are accidents during moving or in the process of a sloppy installation.

Logical failures are another serious, but rather innocuous, cause of data loss. Every hard drive has a ‘useful’ life’, a certain number of hours that it is designed to perform for; once this ‘useful life’ is reached, the drive often experiences a logical failure, i.e. it ‘forgets’ where all its data is and thus appears to exhibit data loss; the data still exists, but is difficult to retrieve and salvage.

Dealing with data loss is a stressful and traumatic experience; however, experts are unanimous that the first step every ‘victim’ should take is ‘don’t panic’. The most important thing to do once a victim realises that data loss may have taken place is to: (1) remove the ‘calamity factors’, for example, extinguish all fires, drain water, etc, (2) prevent further data loss, as explained subsequently, (3) leave the drive ‘as is’, i.e. the most important thing to do is ‘do nothing’ and (4) call a data recovery expert. Further data loss can be prevented by avoiding the urge to examine the drive, or by failing to turn it off as soon as possible. If the victim hears a ‘crunching’ noise coming from the drive, the drive is experiencing damage with every revolution it makes and must be turned off immediately. Unless the victim is a trained data recovery" expert, he or she should resist the urge to tinker with the drive in an effort to assess the extent of the damage or begin the data recovery process. Such an uninformed and unnecessary examination runs the risk of exacerbating the already delicate situation, and must be avoided at all costs.

It is important to bear in mind the following, incredibly heartening statistic: over 85 percent of all data recovery efforts are successful! Data recovery experts use a wide variety of specialised tools and methods in an attempt to recover all of the damaged/lost data and are successful in a great majority of their efforts. In the rare cases in which they are unable to recover data, they can often obtain information about the type of data lost, or in some cases, a partial backup of that data; this makes it possible for an organisation to reconstruct or obtain that missing data once again.

Thus, if there were a ‘Dummies Guide to Data Recovery’, it would read as follows: back up, don’t panic, call an expert, don’t panic and, most importantly, back up!