We know all data is important to our clients, and we will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to recover everything we can. However there are times when storage devices are in such a bad state, our engineers will need to target the priority data as they fear the device could fail completely during the recovery operation. And once the storage device has completely failed, the data is either unrecoverable or the costs increase dramatically as our engineers spend more time on complex operations and donor parts.
This situation is rather like a house being on fire. You will rescue the most important items first of all. If our engineers know what to aim for, they can save time and reduce the stress the storage device is under, increasing the chances of a successful recovery.
Business Data
Whether data needs to be recovered from a single drive, NAS, SAN or RAID it's vital the impact of the data loss is assessed. It's important to know how the lost data has effected day to day operational tasks, and what data is needed when, to address business continuity. For example, a drive containing an SQL Database used for production and an application used once a quarter has died. The priority data would be the SQL Database, as it's essential to the normal operation of the business.
Home User Data
What don't we save on our own computers? From family pictures and videos to tax returns and school work. It's all important! How do you prioritise this data? It is difficult as we often forget what we have and what we don't have. Again it's all about what is needed when. Are there deadlines for school and University work? Is it time for tax self-assessment, or do those pictures from last week's wedding need sharing or are they the only copies? Ideally we need to know the following:
- File Names
- Folder Names
- File Types (Word, Excel, Jpg, Mov etc)
It also helps if you tell us if the drive is encrypted in anyway as well. So if your device or any files are encrypted or password protected please supply all of the relevant usernames and passwords.
Most of the time we recover all data, but if we know what data is the priority, we can aim for that! The last situation we all need is that we've recovered data, the storage device fails and the data we have is not what you need.
R3 Data Recovery is real lab that deals with real disasters each an every day. If you have any sort of problem with a hard drive or any data storage device, we are the people to contact.