Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and Disaster Recovery. Not long ago while I was in an assignment in east Africa, on a contract for a Electrical and telecommunication company, we had seen one of the biggest disasters of our times happen in a banking institution. A contract we had taken for the bank on Telecommunications had not stated that we would handle backup and recovery services but the IT department thought that it was our duty and it was on the contract. During an installation of a new server on their premises, we had asked for the data to be transferred from the old server to the new one. Disaster happened there and no one knew what hit. The old server did indeed copy all the data to the new one but on complete copy we found that the old server was not accessible after that. Something terrible had happened and we knew that the blame was to go to us at some point.

Words were exchanged and some were bad, Most were blames. Slowly we all realized that its time to get the system back to normal at the earliest as we had very little time (6 hours or so for day break). We worked ourselves out and did our best to get all the data on the new server while another team was working on recovering the data on the old one, for we felt it was our responsibility. We saved the data and not to say that we saved the IT department day too. We later found out that they did not have a backup and the server was running out of space and was on full capacity.

In another scenario, we had one of our own team, format a PC of a client. With over 20 PC's to get ready with, Most of them fresh installs, the Staff put in a regular routine of format and install fresh Windows Software on all PC's. It ran well. The client was delivered the PC and then came the whole mess at my boss's table. There was data of god knows what worth on that PC which was formatted and there were clear instructions to not mess with it. Well we screwed up big time.

Data recovery is delicate process. Losing data happens every other day. Some people lose their emails while some get their pc formatted. Recovering the data of the normal PC may sound complicated and its indeed professional game. But when it comes to recovering big data from servers and other drives, you have a completely different ball game. Look at some of the Backup and Data recovery services on your area and you will find that they have a team which will work 18 hours straight without a breath because thats what they are trained for. This is like working for a Post Mortem service in a real ER. Its hard and its fun, But that's the best part in the whole game. If you save the data, your clients are happy, if you dont, you have proved yourself an inefficient, incompetent organization. And guess what, every time you send in your pc for recovery to someone who is inefficient, you stand a chance of not recovering at all as they will mess it a bit more and also waste a lot of time.