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So the unfortunate has happened and somehow you’ve lost your data. Now you are under distress, you have lost all your emails, client details, sales leads and customer payment details.
When you embark on your journey to excel as a business, you would come across such a situation at least once. Depending upon how you’ve prepared yourself for this day, you will end up making or breaking your business.
Disaster recovery planning is essential
The importance of a disaster recovery plan is underrated. Most businesses don’t realize they need to plan disaster management until it becomes a necessity. Some call disaster recovery planning a sign of being a pessimist and end up doing the same themselves.
As hosting providers, we have seen businesses get on the brink of extinction because they had no plan at the place. The result, a small server fault triggered a series of failure in their data center and they ended up losing every bit of data on their servers.
Steps to undertake when you’ve undergone disaster
Define criticality
In today’s digital world, data is money. Data loss, directly or indirectly, leads to capital expenditure. What I am going to say might not resonate with you but there is truth to it.
You could do with data loss if the data is not crucial
Not every bit of information on your server is vital for your business. While some data is indeed critical, some have more or less no impact and it won’t matter if you lose it. The first thing you should do when data loss takes place is defining how critical the lost data was.
If you have lost important files, you need to undertake stringent disaster recovery measures. If the lost files weren’t important, let them remain lost in eternity.
Get your disaster recovery plan in action
Once you have decided that you need lost files back, you need to get your disaster recovery (DR) plan in action. Get in touch with your disaster recovery service provider and ask him to get the backup rolling.
This is the easiest route. Recovery takes less than a minute and in no time the backup would start duplicating on your server.
Most small businesses lack a DR site and run only one instance of the data. If you happen to be one of them, you are in for some added troubles.
Recall the last clean backup
When was the last time you backed up data? Is there any other workstation from where you can restore files, in part or full?
Try to recollect your files and ask your email client to restart the SMTP server. Go4hosting’s meticulous disaster recovery solutions involve backing up emails to an entirely different server. This is because we know emails are crucial while recovering files.
Once you have your email client up and running, download as many files as you can. Download any data that you think would be necessary for the future. Dedicate a day or two in this process.
Get your data recovered from a renowned data recovery service
Your servers may have failed but the hard drives are probably still working. Disconnect the drive from the socket, connect to an external case and then to a workstation. Check if the files are still accessible. If the drive is working, you’ve hit a jackpot, if not, you need to dismantle it.
Takeaway
The disk contains delicate parts that might get damaged beyond repair. Do not dismantle the hard drive yourself, seek help from a trained technician instead. The technician will carefully unmount all parts and extract the magnetic Cloud storage tapes inside it. Using sophisticated tools, the technician will then look for bad sectors and cut them out. The readable sectors are then clipped together and re-mounted to the disk. You won’t recover all the files though.
