October Newsletter

R.A.I.D. 5 Recovered

Written by CBA technician Frank Hernandez

The names in this story have been omitted to protect those parties involved. This story begins on a typical Wednesday afternoon here in our offices. I was busy working on a recovery for one of our customers when the phone rang. I picked up the phone to hear a very worried voice on the other end of the line. They explained to me they had a Dell rack server that was reformatted when they updated it from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003.

They thought they had backed up all their important financial files but a few days after the system upgrade accounting called him saying the files that were backed up were the wrong files. He told me he had attempted to recover the data himself but that it was unsuccessful. I told him we could take a look and he was in our offices in less than an hour.

During my first diagnosis of this servers RAID 5 configuration I realized that they had accidently placed the files they had recovered in the same place and with the same files names as the old files. This meant that they had completely overwritten all the files we needed to recover. If you know anything about data recovery then you know that once a file is overwritten it can never be recovered.

I called him and told him what he had done and he said to please take another look and do anything possible because those files would cost him his job if they were not recovered. So I went over the RAID 5 and opened a bottle of magic we store here in our office. It took me about a week but I was able to recover one hundred percent of this customer’s data. He came in and was shocked that we had found all the data that had ever been on that Dell servers RAID 5. Lets just say that company is a customer for life now. This was just another day’s work here at Computer Based Associates, Inc.