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Before I had a
Cd-rewriter, I used floppy disks for essential backups. One day my hard drive
failed and with limited backups of the work I'd done I looked scuppered. Luckily,
I was doing a computer science degree and knew all was not lost.
Data recovery is
a webmaster's get out of jail card. Even with a catastrophic hard drive failure,
recovery of data can be done. The downside is that it can be quite expensive.
It's best to spend some time looking at firms who specialise in it and consider
those who offer a no recovery no charge, maybe a free diagnostic look at the drive
etc.
Basically, data
recovery will involve the company attempting to firstly clone the data on the
drive using a straight sector-to-sector approach, then using the clone to try
to rebuild a structure which makes that data accessible again. Back in the old
days this process was tedius. Nowadays, data recovery software is far more sophisticated
and so are the technicians who perform it. Sometimes depending on the damage to
surrounding electronics, they may have to build an interface that can safely recover
the information - more expensive aswell.
After they have
the new structure or have managed to repair your drive they will offer you the
option, depending on whether the hard drive is repairable of having your old recovered
drive, or a backup of the data. Always ask the company about security and confidentiality.
Many pride themselves on this. Having worked in computer repairs, there are many
technicians who like the occasional snoop at the data.
Even if your drive
has been involved in a fire or 'wet scenario', the heads themselves may not be
damaged. It may look burnt, but the data may still be recoverable.
The best scenario
to avoid the need for disk recovery is to have regular backups. A daily webmaster
backup isn't unheard of. I do this, and store the data on dvd rewritables offsite.
Tape backups can be slow, but you can fit many many gigabytes on them and are
useful as a weekly approach, especially if your webmaster business has a lot of
vital information that cannot be lost.
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