Every data recovery vendor claims to handle “complex recoveries.” But what does complex actually mean?
It’s not just the clean room
Clean rooms are impressive – and they should be staffed by skilled engineers. But procedures like head-swap assemblies and platter transfers have become routine in top labs. That’s not to diminish the engineers who do them; it’s to point out that, in serious recovery companies, such procedures are performed daily.
Real complexity lives elsewhere:
– 5E, 5EE, 6E, and nested configurations
– Drobo’s BeyondRAID, EMC’s Parity RAID, vendor-specific metadata
– custom sector sizes, non-standard drives, enterprise arrays with unique geometries
– recovering data is one thing; returning data that is valid and usable is another
A real complex case: EMC RAID 5 with 520-byte sectors
A top supplier of automotive parts to the world’s most prestigious vehicle manufacturers lost business-critical databases in one of its largest North American production facilities. Two of the three RAID volumes in the EMC RAID 5 array went offline – and one of those volumes contained the SQL Payroll System database.
Beyond the usual complexity of RAID recovery, the unique data structure of the failed EMC AX array added another layer: the typical hard drive sector is 512 bytes, but on this model the sectors were 520 bytes. Most recovery companies would need extensive time just to reconfigure and manually piece together the 520-byte sectors.
Because ACE RAID Recovery had already developed proprietary software for custom sector sizes on unstable media, we quickly merged the data into volumes. Our RAID engineering team imaged all drives in the EMC array and reconstructed all three volumes – two of which required special handling due to file system corruption.
That’s where most companies would have stopped. We didn’t. We performed a SQL database consistency check and a torn-page verification to make sure the recovered databases were not corrupted. Only when the volumes were confirmed operational was the data returned – and the company was soon up and running again.
What “complex” really means
A complex recovery is a multi-step process involving different types of expertise:
- Getting the drives to a workable level to retrieve the data
- Reassembling that data based on the RAID configuration
- Taking the extra step to verify that the reconstructed data contains usable files
It doesn’t matter if it’s SQL Server, a VMware virtual machine, Exchange Server, or a file system: the data returned to you should be valid and functional. That’s why you trust your data to a company with 40+ years of experience and the ability to handle any level of complexity.
Call 844-223-7243 — engineers answer 24/7 — or start a case online for a free evaluation. No data, no fee.
No data, no fee