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Jun

What is Data Recovery? Is Data Recovery Software Needed?

Article by: David Wigle

Anyone who has experienced a computer crash or damage to their pc knows it would be great to get it all back. Should data recovery software be purchased?

The scenario is typically one such as this; John (fictional character) is going about his day-to-day life, minding his own business, working away on his computer when suddenly, it crashes. Maybe it was a virus or the motherboard that overheated. Or maybe John dropped his laptop or some other damage occurred which, regardless of what, he now needs to recover the information on his hard drive.

What is Data Recovery?
Wikipedia describes data recovery as “…the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally”. To put it more plainly, some something has occurred which resulted in a person not being able to access their electronic device and they now need a way to recover their files. Thus, the actual process of data recovery involves using software and/or an alternate computer to recover files from the damaged computer.

Types of Data Recovery Situations
There are only two types of situations, where a person would need to have their electronic information ‘recovered’.

Internal damage to the device
External damage to the device
Internal damage refers to programs designed to alter the way the computer works. Commonly known as viruses (which can include adware and malware), the purpose of these programs is to disrupt how a computer normally functions. Given enough time, these programs can change file names, paths, directories, links, computer commands and partially or completely delete items, thus resulting in a ‘crash’.

External damage refers to something physical happening to the device. Exposure to heat or liquids (especially anything with sugar) can result in damage to the circuitry. Impact damage from dropping the device, or it being involved in an accident (such as a car accident), which may damage the memory storage unit (memory card or flash drive or hard drive).

Data Recovery: How Does it Work
Depending on the type of damage to the memory of the electronic device, data recovery can be as simple as plugging into a secondary device. For instance, if one were to drop their digital camera, the camera itself may be ruined, but the memory card may be have suffered no damage at all. In that instance, simply plugging the memory card into another device that could read it may be all that is required to retrieve the data. If there is no damage to the memory unit, then there is no need for data recovery software.

If damage has been done to the memory, such as would occur in the instance of a computer virus, then data recovery software is used to retrieve all undamaged files and images. Obviously having an up-to-date anti-virus program provides safety and security from most viruses, but not all. Therefore, keep in mind that viruses are usually time sensitive; the longer the device is turned on, the more damage will be done to the file. Powering off the device halts the progress of the virus and greatly aids in the number of files that can be recovered.

Data Recovery: Is a Data Recovery Program Worth Having

The answer to this question is both yes and no. If there is only one computer in the house, then owning data recovery software will be useless. This is because a second computer is required to ‘recover’ the data from the damaged computer. Also, if damage to the memory unit is a result of physical damage, then a technician may first be required to rebuild the unit before any data recovery can be attempted.

It is worth owning data recovery software if there is more than one computer in the house as paying a technician for their services, which can easily run past $150.00. Rarely ever will two or more computers ‘crash’ at the same time thus one of the computers is able to act as the recovery computer.

Data Recovery Software: It’s Like Insurance

Owning data recovery software is very similar to owning insurance. Having the right insurance for the right circumstance will provide protection in the event of an emergency, but it also depends on each person’s individual point in life. Many people get along just fine but simply investing in an external hard drive and making a habit of backing up their computer files on a monthly basis.

This way, should the computer ever crash, there’s actually no need to recover anything. External hard drives have become very inexpensive and can hold up to 1-2 Terabytes of data. Like all other purchases, it benefits the owner to take their time when deciding whether or not to buy, and then what type is right. Don’t rely on the statements from the software developer, look for independent reviews and customer comments to find out which is right and which is rot.

Jun

Is Online Data Backup Part of Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

Categories: Information Technology

Tags: backup

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Every business needs to backup their electronic data. By choosing to use an online backup service as part of your disaster recovery plan, you can assure your data is offsite, safe and secure in case of a disaster.

Whether you have a small business or a large corporation, one of the most valuable assets of your business is its electronic data. Your business’s electronic data consists of its financial information, documentation on clients and sales, and all other data stored on your computers and file servers.

Have you ever thought about what would happen to your company if you were the victim of any kind of disaster? Natural or man-made?

How expensive would the recovery effort be? Would your business be able to recover from such a loss? Where would you even begin the recovery process? All of these questions, and more, should be addressed in your company’s disaster recovery plan.

Every single business today, large or small, should have a disaster recovery plan in place for its electronic data. No matter what the size or income of your company is, you need to be able to recover your electronic data if something happens to your servers or to your buildings.

To start to build your disaster recovery plan, you will have some serious choices to make about how you archive your data and where you will store it once it has been backed up.

One option for backing up your data is to back it up on tapes each day. If you have a small amount of data you can perform complete daily backups each evening when no one is in the building and using your file server.

If you choose to backup your data each night, you will need multiple tapes so that you will always have archives to restore from if the need ever arises and you find something wrong with one of your tapes.

If you perform onsite backups then you will need to take your media to an offsite location to store at least once each week. By storing a copy offsite, you make certain that if there is a disaster at your building then your data will still be available to you. This will help you if you have to rebuild your file servers from scratch.

The downside to onsite backup is that it requires you to have an information technology technician to physically change-out tapes. And, more importantly, they need to remember to move your media tapes offsite each week.

Another downside to localizing the task is that the media tapes can be very expensive to purchase, and you will probably need many of them for your nightly and weekly replication tasks.

A more attractive option to using onsite data backup is to perform all of your replication to an offsite backup location. You can do this by utilizing a professional online backup service.

To use a professional online data backup service you would simply schedule a time for your server to connect to your backup service and duplicate your data onto their server. The data will travel over the Internet, through a secure and encrypted channel.

There are many big advantages to using an online data backup service. You do not have to purchase tapes and tape drives. You do not have to have someone remember to physically change your tapes, and remember to bring them to an offsite location.

And, your data is much safer being stored a long way away from your business, in a safe and secure computing environment.

It is vital to the existence of your business to address the issue of backing up and storing your electronic data. By making a disaster recovery plan, which includes online backup services, you can be assured your data is safe and secure in case you need it for any reason. When disaster hits, the security of your electronic data is assured with online data backup. Backup Services

Jun

Making the Case for a Robust, Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Strategy

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: backup, disaster management, Virtualization

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Summary

IT departments today are feeling increased pressure to improve their business continuity capabilities while containing costs. Here are some ways enterprise IT organizations can implement robust high availability and disaster strategies.

Introduction

Just how complex has the typical data center become? According to one recent survey, roughly two-thirds of data center managers said their data centers are too complex to manage easily. And if dealing with this complexity wasn’t challenging enough, more than half of the managers said internal service-level-agreement demands are increasing.

At the same time, budgets continue to be constrained. According to the most recent Symantec State of the Data Center Report, data center budget growth has been “minimal” over the past five years.

Given these pressures, what can proactive IT managers do to cost-effectively ensure the availability and recovery of their mission-critical applications? This article explores some of the options.

Unprecedented threats

Today, so-called High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) solutions need to address an unprecedented number of threats, ranging from component failure (e.g., a disk that runs out of space), to worms and viruses, to more widespread outages (such as a power failure), to catastrophic site outages (as a result, say, of a tornado).

But according to a recent Forrester Research survey, IT departments aren’t adequately conveying that message to upper management. Forrester surveyed 250 disaster recovery professionals in October, 2007 and concluded that IT managers need to do a much better job of convincing business leaders to invest in disaster recovery systems.

According to Forrester Senior Analyst Stephanie Balaouras, managers must demonstrate that disaster recovery isn’t simply an “insurance policy, ” but can actually boost operational efficiency by protecting systems against potential failures.

Balaouras says companies should consider disaster recovery investment as a “rolling upgrade” that consistently augments existing infrastructure and application investments rather than as a one-time event that can be delayed.

The lessons of Katrina

Other observers contend that recent natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina lend extra urgency to the argument for a robust disaster recovery strategy.

“The widespread confusion that followed Hurricane Katrina brought into sharp focus the need for comprehensive business continuity plans that incorporated secondary data center sites located far enough away so as to be untouched by the disaster affecting the primary data site, ” Dan Lamorena, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Symantec, has written. “However, many IT organizations believe the costs involved in establishing secondary data centers are out of reach for all but the largest organizations.”

Lamorena has proposed five strategies that can help enterprise IT organizations implement robust high availability and disaster strategies and, at the same time, maximize system availability for day-to-day operations.

Identify problems immediately. Traditionally, one of the challenges in executing timely disaster recovery has been a slow alerting process. Today, thanks to advanced clustering technology, notification and reporting capabilities can pinpoint when an outage occurs and immediately notify administrators of a problem. Clustering technology can then start up applications at a secondary data center and connect users to that data center.
Reduce downtime with automation. For mission-critical applications that demand minimal downtime, the disaster recovery process must be highly automated and resilient—such applications require an intelligent application recovery infrastructure. An automated approach, such as high availability clustering, eliminates significant downtime compared to a traditional manual recovery process. If a system fails in the primary data center, the software can restart the application automatically on another server, with limited action required by IT personnel.
Exploit the potential of secondary sites. Most enterprise IT organizations view secondary sites strictly as cost centers, sitting idle much of the time. But secondary sites can be used for test development, quality assurance, or even less critical applications. In addition, advanced clustering software reduces the high cost of requiring applications to fail over to the identical hardware that the production applications run on. The most sophisticated clustering software permits fail-overs between different storage and server hardware within a data center or at remote sites.
Realize value in virtual environments. Server virtualization has become mainstream technology in today’s data center. Server virtualization employs virtual machine technology to allow multiple operating systems to be run on a single server. Restarting virtual servers at secondary sites has traditionally been a manual process. But new clustering software allows companies to deploy server virtualization technology and gain the same automated disaster recovery benefits they can expect in their physical server environments. Keep in mind too that using virtual servers as the fail-over targets for mission-critical applications reduces hardware/power/space costs at the recovery site.
Regularly test the disaster recovery plan. A study conducted in October, 2007 by Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal found that 50% of companies test their disaster recovery plan just once a year, while 14% never test. Companies sometimes are reluctant to conduct DR testing because it means bringing down production systems and because it’s labor-intensive. With automated fail-over capabilities, IT organizations can test recovery procedures using a copy of the production data – without interrupting production, corrupting data, or risking problems when restarting a production application. Disaster recovery best practices say that the disaster recovery plan must be tested, revised, and updated regularly. Symantec recommends that companies take this seriously and test their disaster recovery environment regularly in accordance with the needs of the business.

Conclusion

IT departments today are feeling increased pressure to improve their business continuity capabilities while containing costs. At the same time, businesses large and small view a greater percentage of their applications as “mission-critical.” According to the Forrester Research/Disaster Recovery Journal study, respondents classified 35% of their applications as mission-critical. Failure to recover these essential applications in a timely fashion can have a devastating impact, resulting in lost revenue, compliance breaches, loss of customers, and a tarnished brand.

Today, a new generation of high availability and disaster recovery software is improving IT departments’ ability to cost-effectively deliver maximum uptime and improve productivity. Moreover, these solutions provide IT with the tools to non-intrusively test and verify their recovery infrastructure in an automated, cost-effective manner. Given the catastrophic consequences of recent natural disasters, such solutions need to be on the radar screen of all IT departments.

Source: Symantec Small Business Solutions