Data Recovery

When a hard disk is immersed in water can it just be dried off an re-used? The short answer is "no", so what problems will be caused to a hard drive by flood water, or water from any other source? At first sight a hard disk drive that has been sitting in flood water for 3 weeks looks doomed, but sometimes the data can be recovered so long as the correct procedures are followed and the hardware engineers are adequately skilled.

Knowing that your data exists on a set of tapes, but being unable to access it, can be a frustrating experience especially when there is noting actually "wrong" with the tapes and the data is almost certainly intact. This was the situation one of our customers faced with their Tivoli TSM archive when the expiration date had been incorrectly set and the TSM application [quite correctly] decided that the tapes no longer contained any data that was required. The question to us was "could our tape data recovery service recover the data?".

It had been a bad few days resulting in a new building and computer equipment being required, but at least there was a backup of the data so the systems could be re-instated without too much fuss and bother, or could they? No they could not, a problem within the backup that led to a file backup being incomplete was causing the restore to fail before the all important data was reached. What was the problem, more to the point was a data recovery possible?