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November 6, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 27
Page(s) 26 in print issue
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Recovering Data From Hard Drives
Whether You Hire A Pro Or Do It Yourself, There Are Steps You Should Take To Prepare
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| Key Points
• IT staff should be equipped to handle most routine data recovery tasks.
• More complex restores will require help from a professional data-recovery service.
• Compliance regulations should be examined closely if sending drives offsite. | A senior executive calls the help desk: His hard drive is corrupt, and he’s lost all of his data. Or, the CEO sends you an email asking what the next step is when someone permanently deletes an email message that was stored locally in Outlook, with no backup.
For most data center managers, there are two primary options. One is to solve the problem yourself by running data retrieval software on the local drive. This approach is often fast and produces the best results—if a file or folder has been deleted by mistake. In other cases, when a drive is no longer functioning, it might mean hiring a professional service agency that knows how to rebuild a drive from scratch and retrieve data, often at a high cost. For most data centers, deciding how to approach hard drive recovery problems requires asking questions about the kind of data that has been lost, whether there is a backup process in place so that the data can be restored from tape, and if the data is stored on a single hard drive or on a more complex disk array or storage area network.
Charles King, president and principal analyst with PUND-IT (www.pund-it.com), says one of the main issues with drive recovery is not necessarily technological, but related to personnel. IT staff are paid to solve problems and should be trained to restore data in the event of a problem. Often, routine data recovery has to do with a deleted file or directory. Those issues should be resolved by IT staff and not outsourced in order to achieve cost savings.
King says companies should first evaluate whether IT staff can restore the data and then look to professional services for help with complex restores. He says another issue has to do with the kind of data you need to restore. For legacy, non-mission-critical data, it is usually worth the effort to restore that data in-house. And, for sensitive data—such as financial records—in-house restore is preferred.
“For anything related to intellectual property and strategic issues, many companies prefer to keep a close eye on the data,” says King. “Not to impugn the security of disk recovery companies, but restores by an offsite facility are not attractive to some.”
For critical “single instance” data that has no backup (such as data that was lost before a backup occurred, or on an employee’s notebook), King says companies are better off going to a specialist. He equates this to going to a doctor for routine health issues vs. a surgeon who can do a much more thorough analysis: only the surgeon knows the exact steps to solve a complex problem.
 Recovery Steps
When dealing with a recovery internally, the first step is to decide how critical the data is and whether it absolutely needs to be recovered. After determining the need, the basic process involves booting up the hard drive in such a way that you can recover the data. This can mean using the drive on another computer but usually requires a more thorough check of the drive.
Steven Minter, a spokesperson for Network Data Center Host (www.ndchost.com), says it is important to determine whether data is not readable because there is something wrong with the data or because there is something wrong with the drive. If the data is corrupt, he says you can try a block copy (one that does a bit-by-bit duplication) to at least capture the data from the drive and place it in another location.
However, if the drive itself is bad, the usual approach is to fix those mechanical issues. When a professional services company does this step, it might remove the actual platters from the drive and rebuild them into an exact match for that model and access the data.
“If the system is not recognizing the disk, the failure may have to do with the PCB or components on the drive and may not [be] a mechanical issue,” says Minter. “You may try to replace the board on the disk with that of the exact same make and model drive. Doing so depends on the make and model of the drive, but in many cases, the external board on the disk can be replaced by removing a few trox nuts and resoldering a 3-4 wire connector to the internal components. If this works, it should only be run long enough to get the data off onto a new disk. If it’s a mechanical issue where the platter isn’t spinning, you can try to crack the case and put those components into another disk body of equal build, and doing so in a clean environment with express care is your only hope, but it should be done as a last resort.”
Understand The Complexities
Of course, even with proper staff training and expertise, with adherence to regulations about sensitive financial data, and after analyzing whether the data has a recent backup, the typical data center often uses RAID arrays, SANs, and complex server configurations in addition to single hard drives. Restoring data from these devices may require professional, offsite assistance.
When working with professional services that restore data, Kamel Shaath, the CTO at KOM Networks (www.komnetworks.com), says it is important to realize that the process is also complex—even in dealing with agencies that perform data restores routinely. The companies that perform restores may use a clean room to remove platters from a hard drive and rebuild the platters into a matching drive. The process can sometimes take several weeks or months.
He says it is also important to know that confidentiality is still an issue, no matter how complex the restore process might be, and that in some cases privacy is more important than the data—and it may be possible to recreate the data (even at a high expense) to maintain security. “I’m a control freak—I would want them to come onsite and do it,” he says. “If you are a bank and you need confidentiality and have no disaster recovery process, I have no sympathy for you at all. Often, companies have plans but they do not exercise them effectively.”
Shaath says one common mistake is for companies to go into a panic mode and to follow the same process for all data, regardless of how important it is to the company. In the end, how you respond is critical. Examine the data that needs to be recovered, the complexity of the infrastructure, and whether there are any alternatives to a professional restore process. 
by John Brandon
Disaster Recovery, Not Data Recovery
The best plan of action for maintaining data integrity is often to not be forced into a position where you must recover the data. Kamel Shaath, CTO at KOM Networks (www.komnetworks.com) says a disaster recovery plan and good backups present alternatives to having to restore data from a hard drive that is corrupt or unusable. He says cloud storage is another option, but warns that it is not always a good replacement for backups.
“Organizations have looked at the cloud or outsourcing part of their entire infrastructure, but there are a lot of hidden costs,” says Shaath. “To surrender control means you are willing to accept whatever happens. I have heard stories where companies outsource but then find they do not have the resources available and they have to wait for a restore or for resources to become available.” |
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