Category Archives: Data Recovery Services

Loss of data is a major concern for all businesses everywhere. It doesn’t matter what type of business it is or how big or small it is, if valuable data is lost it can set them back weeks or months and will cost them time and money. One solution to this problem is continuous data protection (CDP), also known as continuous backup. CDP works by automatically saving and capturing all versions of data that a user saves. It enables the user to restore data from a specific point in time.

This function of specific time restoration is what differentiates CDP from traditional backup systems. With a traditional backup you can only restore the data from the point at which the backup was taken. With CDP, the data is written to a disk and to a second location on another computer on the network.

You need to be careful when buying your CDP as some packages are marketed as continuous data protection but in fact only restore data at fixed intervals e.g. 1 hour ago or 24 hours ago. These types of solutions are often called “snapshot based”. At the moment there is some debate regarding the term “continuous” and whether or not the backup needs to be “every write” in order to be considered CDP or whether a solution that captures data every few seconds is acceptable. There is also some debate on whether or not the ability to restore from the backup also has to be continuous. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) uses the “every write” definition.

CDP also differs from RAID replication and mirroring, as this technology only protects the most recent copy of the data. If corruption occurs it will protect the corrupt data. CDP, on the other hand, protects against the effects of the corruption by installing a previous, uncorrupted version of the data.

A last benefit of CDP is that is takes up less space that traditional backup systems. CDP solutions save byte or block level differences rather than file level differences. Therefore only the changed byte or block is backed up whereas in traditional back ups the entire file is copied.

If you want to save your business time and expense CDP solutions seem the logical choice as your data is automatically saved without you even having to think about it. It is also easy to restore. If, however, something goes wrong anyway and you find that your data seems irretrievably lost, its nice to know that you can always take your computer to a data recovery specialist and be secure in the knowledge that you are in safe hands.

You’ve been clicking away with your neat digital camera the size of a credit card (or whatever) and now it’s time for the great viewing. It could have been a wedding, or a safari or even baby’s first birthday. You connect it up, but the directory is empty.

Here’s what might have happened:
1. As with data recovery, images leave behind a jpeg marker as well as the data that refers you to the image. So instead of having been deleted, the file is just eclipsed by newer files written over them.
2. A static shock to the camera could corrupt some files, causing the rest to be invisible as well. You’ll know this has happened when you can’t carry on taking all those cheesy pics.
3. You had a bit too much champagne and forgot that you borrowed someone else’s card to jam more images into your camera. The other card’s still in your pocket, next to the squished carnation.

You wouldn’t pull your hard disk apart looking for lost documents, so don’t do it to your camera. Rather send it to data recovery specialists, who have the correct software to retrieve last data as quickly and efficiently as possible. You don’t have to forget your favourite day, ever. Recover it.

De-duplication is a marvellous technology that greatly drops the cost of data backup down as it rids backup data of redundant, useless impertinent information. Up to a 50 to 1 storage size reduction rate can be achieved by the most recent virtual tape libraries. De-duplication suppliers, such as Diligent Technologies, Sepaton, FalconStor Software Inc., Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp), Quantum, Symantec Corp. and NEC, have chipped in well to the effort to lower storage costs in the world of data backup. There are a couple of negative points to the de-duplication idea. Power efficiency is a problem as users have had to revert to tape backup storage due to high consumption levels of energy associated with the de-duplication process. Also, the question remains if de-duplication will work properly together with encryption and compression technologies in the first place.