We are a global leader in providing professional data recovery software, in-lab data recovery services and data sanitization solutions. Our in-house team of 100+ R&D experts develop world’s largest portfolio of data recovery software. Our services team ensures that our clients can be worry free in cases of data loss from broken devices or when they want to completely erase data to prevent any breach.
This article describes general data-loss prevention tips, the causes of various types of data loss (laptop, database, server data and tape data), and the formats and manufacturers supported by Seagate Recovery Services (SRS).
Data loss is generally characterised by one or more of the following:
Among other causes, data loss can be attributed to system or human error, adverse environmental conditions and device failure:
The following sections describe types of data recovery and supported formats and manufacturers. RAID data recovery, digital photo recovery and VMWare workstation data loss are covered in separate articles under “Related Links”.
As they are often carried about and exposed to different environmental factors such as heat, water and dust, laptop and notebook computers are far more likely to experience data loss than their office desktop counterparts. Their portability makes these sophisticated and essential in-the-field devices prime candidates for data loss.
Mechanical and electrical failure, software corruption and human error all play a role in data loss. Here are some of the most commonly noted data loss symptoms and data accessibility problems:
You may not know this, but the hard disc drive embedded in your laptop is not necessarily from the same manufacturer as the laptop. Seagate Recovery Services recovers data from all notebook and laptop brands, models and interfaces – that is, from all types of hard disc drive from all manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Samsung.
Mission-critical data is often stored in SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Exchange Server, Access and other databases that are maintained on networked file servers. Relational and object-oriented database management technologies are fundamental to modern IT systems, often underpinning the lifeblood applications run by the entire corporation.
Individual media in database servers suffer from the same failure points as disc drives in personal computers and workstations. Experienced system administrators and database administrators know that a relational or object-oriented database environment is fragile unless supported by a comprehensive and well-tested backup plan.
Unfortunately, it is all too common for devices to become corrupt beyond the scope of routine recovery methods:
Seagate Recovery Services specialises in making inaccessible data accessible once again, recovering data from the most complex database configurations.
SRS can also make inaccessible data accessible again for all xbase products such as dBase, FoxPro Productivity Applications Microsoft Office (including all versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint Mail Server and Client Applications), Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Applications, and email systems conforming to the UNIX mbox format, such as Eudora and Netscape.
Today, servers are the backbone of modern business. They store the data that enables day-to-day operations. Despite the fact that businesses take the necessary measures to protect their valuable information, not all the protection measures and redundancy can prevent the unpredictable. Individual media in servers suffer from the same failure points as do drives in personal computers and workstations. Additionally, the increased complexity of modern server storage systems creates more data loss situations, such as:
Because servers are used for mission-critical operations, customers usually need to recover their data quickly and securely. SRS offerings include options for priority handling, onsite data recovery, critical 24×7 service, as well as remote data recovery and special customised solutions. Our goal is to recover the client’s data as quickly as possible and in the most accommodating way.
SRS supports the majority of currently used server operating systems, including Microsoft, Apple, different flavours of UNIX and Linux, AIX, Netware and many more.
Seagate Recovery Services is going virtual and offers the full spectrum of data recovery options for VMware (ESX/ESXi and vSphere), Microsoft (Hyper-V) and other hypervisor systems.
The virtual environment adds two more levels* of abstraction that increase the complexity of recovery by adding failure points on Hypervisor and VM levels:
FIGURE 1: Virtual vs. Physical Failures
We can help you to recover lost data in the following scenarios:
Server and personal-computer tape backup systems using mm DAT, Travan, Exabyte 8mm, LTO and the various QIC formats are popular and necessary to safeguard your data. However, when these tapes fail, the situation is normally catastrophic, as these tapes were often the only remaining repository of the data. Quite often, customers may no longer have the original tape hardware or software to restore from legacy environments.
Fire, smoke, water and even dropping the tape cartridge may damage the media, resulting in data loss. Internal mechanism failure and exposure to extreme temperatures, as well as logical read/write errors on a tape’s file may also result in data loss. Due to the nature of the tape solution, they are designed to withstand time to store archives. Some media, if stored incorrectly or stored longer than the life span of the media, may degrade causing data loss.
Here are some typical causes of tape failure:
Popular backup software – such as EMC, Networker, CA BrightStore (ArcServe) plus the UNIX tar and cpio utilities (and many more) – all use different internal formats. SRS programmers are expertly trained to understand and extract data from any type of tape media, regardless of format. SRS recovers data from the following tape media formats and manufacturers, among others: