Case Studies

Restoring data from tapes when you no longer have the drive to read them can be problematic. Add to this a change of operating platform from AS/400 to UNIX and the need to therefore restore AS/400 objects on a UNIX system in a usable form, and the problems increase dramatically. This was the case for one customer and it was beginning to look as if they would need to re-instate their original system to have any chance of accessing the data, then they contacted Altirium.

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?".

A tape archive can grow with impressive yet daunting speed, and with it the volume of data that is held within it. With the pressure to be able to respond to internal restore requests or regulatory demands for data, knowing that files can be restored from the archive is essential. Since a single copy of the data at one location is vulnerable to tape failure, fire or flood, having the tapes tested and a second copy made can give great peace of mind.