Recovery specialists revive dead data

24.07.2006
The urgent need to recover digital data after disasters like hard drive failures and power outages has remained largely unaltered since companies entered the Electronic Age. What has changed is the greater complexity of the devices that fail and their increased media capacity, according to specialists from Ontrack Data Recovery. Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell spoke with Todd Johnson, vice president of operations, and Mike Burmeister, director of engineering for data recovery, about how data recovery has changed and what users can do to avoid having to call Ontrack in the first place.

How are the technical challenges of recovering data different today?

Burmeister: Ten to 15 years ago, you could solve many drive failures with simple procedures that could be summarized as mechanical in nature. Today, we deal with the same mechanical problems, but they are much more difficult because of ... the smaller drives and increased media capacity. On top of the mechanical problems, today there is an array of electronic failure scenarios that are very complex and require high-level engineering skills to solve.

Johnson: Things like the Exchange databases, the SQL database recoveries, are relatively new, and it's much more challenging from a computer science perspective to solve.

How have your recovery techniques changed?

Johnson: Many techniques are the same, with little changes or adjustments. But there are also many new techniques developed to address the difficulties of electronics failures and various forms of data corruptions that leave drives in a completely dead state.