The company has become the first Cape Town based IT company to offer open drive recovery services and has since then also expanded its reach in RAID recovery to Durban and Johannesburg.
Data Recovery Solutions
With the launch of their website Intratec has made it easier for companies to locate the services of experts in RAID recovery. According to a company spokesperson, the company has set the benchmark for recovery services in South Africa, putting the country on par with the rest of the world. Accordingly data that would have been lost otherwise, costing a company thousands to millions, can now be recovered from just about any type of media.
The Intratec technicians do initial diagnosis of the media and set a quotation before they attempt to recover any lost data. With this approach the client stays in control of their budget and can make a decision regarding the cost effectiveness of the approach.
Major Causes for RAID Array System Failures and Solutions
South African companies often struggle with data recovery because of the very nature of RAID architecture. The main causes for failure of the systems are that of human error as the most prominent cause, transmission problems, general software configuration and failure, and finally hardware problems. Because of the complexity of the array systems, it is imperative to have adequate recovery protocols in place to prevent large scale data loss and possible system damage.
Recovery Process
Companies more often than not, misunderstand the complexities revolving around the recovery process. Any recovery of data must be done as quickly as possible, but without proper diagnosis, large scale losses can occur. According to Intratec, when it comes to RAID systems, they treat any data loss as urgent. The first step involves a complete diagnosis of data loss, system operation, software and the possible causes for failure.
The second step involves data cloning through the use of sophisticated software. During the process, data is obtained from the image. There are instances when an image is simply not available. A reconstruction process follows in the latter case, resembling the RAID processing. Should hardware failure be the cause for data loss, the damaged components must first be replaced and the various drives reassembled. Various RAID configurations are supported including 0, 1, 5, 1+0 and Non-RAID. The most complex of recoveries take place on non-RAID configurations.
Corporate entities can make use of the data recovery expertise offered by companies such as Intratec to recover deleted or lost files and drives as well as partitions, recovery of emails, and restoring formatted media. Other instances when such help may needed include that of files damaged by viruses, software being corrupted because of environmental factors, data lost because of damaged storage media, restoration of any corrupted data, recovering of hardware and for forensic data analysis purposes.
Upon the question of which OS and file systems can be recovered, the spokesperson explained that the main systems are recoverable including that of operating systems such as Linux, UNIX, Windows, DOS, Mac OS, and Novell Netware.
Data can be recovered on various media types including SATA and SCSI drives, 1.1 “ and 1.8 “ drives, SAS and IDE drives, flash cards, floppy disks, memory sticks and smart media as well as IPods. Apart from RAID recovery, removable media recoveries are amongst the most requested.
Removable media can take the form of a flash drive, floppy or stiffy drive, and optical discs. In most instances, recovery can be made. Some of the common causes for loss of data on removable media are that of viruses, media not accessible, reformatting, data deletion, and damage of the media surface.
When it thus comes to data or RAID recovery, South Africans can sleep easier knowing that there are companies that specialise in various recovery services. Whether data has been lost by accident or corrupted because of hardware, software or surface damage, expert help available now makes it easier to recover vital information and operating systems.
