IT TRENDS
‘I want my data back’ It trends
— Photo: Special Arrangement
Recovery measures: Working on a damaged hard disk in Stellar’s Class 100 Clean Room in Gurgaon.
Just over a year ago, the devastating cyclone ‘Gonu’ struck the coast of Oman, bringing torrential waters into its capital, Muscat, and flooding many computer installations. For weeks after that episode, it was round-the-clock work, in a quiet corner of Gurgaon’s Sector 33, where engineers grappled with the challenge of recovering precious corporate data from dozens of water damaged hard disk drives, that had been shipped from Oman, to the ‘Class 10
0’ ultra clean lab rooms of Stellar Information Systems, one of the best known names in the understated, global business of data safety and recovery ( www.stellarinfo.com).
The last edition of this column (The Hindu, September 11, 2008) reviewed the broad data recovery challenges for the enterprise sector. This edition completes the picture with a look at how this is actually done.
As enterprise storage needs crash through the terabyte ceiling into petabytes, data recovery has emerged as a key corporate concern (a petabyte is 1024 terabytes. A terabyte is 1024 gigabytes.
A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. And a megabyte is just over a million bytes of information).
But since so much of the data that needs to be recovered is priceless — and highly sensitive — those who specialize in this line of service, prefer to maintain a low profile: business grows as word-of-mouth enhances their reputation for discreet and confidential recovery services.
Rare privilege
It was therefore a rare privilege to visit Stellar’s facility and walk (suitably clothed) through India’s largest (and the second-largest in Asia, after Korea) Clean Room, rated Class 100 — that means, a room designed to never allow more than 100 particles of 0.5 microns or larger, per cubic foot of air.
Such an ultra clean environment is necessary, before one can even begin trying to recover data from damaged disks because it involves completely dis-assembling the hard drive and exposing the magnetic recording surface: even a speck of dust can destroy a stored sector of files.
Stellar is able to accept an extremely wide range of hard disk brands and types, many going back decades, because it maintains a large library of such original disks.
In most cases, where data recovery through purely software methods has not been possible, the failed component is among the many electromechanical components in the drive and not the recording surface (if it were the latter, data recovery would be well nigh impossible).
Engineers replace the damaged parts in the drive offered for recovery, with parts from Stellar’s reference units, and then try to run the unit.
Skilled, time consuming
If that works, the data is dumped on another computer and a copy furnished to the customer on another medium like a DVD.
Such physical repair and recovery is a skilled and time consuming process, attempted only if software methods don’t work: Stellar’s network extends across 137 countries and dozens of centres where customers send their damaged drives.
They can also attempt software recovery on their own using some of the tools offered by Stellar for desktop and laptop recovery; file repair; encrypted media or password recovery. Sending the physical drive to Gurgaon is the last resort.
Once received, it is determined if recovery is possible — and if the answer is ‘yes’ the process is usually completed within a few days: every job is ‘top priority’ for its originator: the records of a bank’s savings accounts; the password directory of a large enterprise; a data base of engineering drawings created after months of work.
“It’s all a matter of trust,” says Stellar’s Chief Executive, Sunil Chandna, “since we entered the data recovery business 15 years ago, we have over a lakh customers.”
Terabyte a reality
What about the rest of us, with our home and small office PCs? Our data is growing too, and one terabyte in the home is now a reality.
In recent weeks, Stellar has launched a few consumer products, ‘Phoenix Photo Recovery’, to get back precious photos in almost all formats, inadvertently erased from digital camera or phone media; ‘Black Cat’, is a combined anti-virus and data recovery tool for formatted drives, deleted partitions and malfunctioning software.
The obverse of data recovery is data removal: sanitising a drive completely of all one’s files and data before disposing it or giving it to another user. Stellar’s ‘Disk Wipe’ solution helps in the permanent removal of data from a hard disk.
When you delete a file on your PC, even when you empty the recycle bin, the information is not completely erased, merely shifted to a different, inaccessible part of the hard disk. This is both good news and bad news, depending on your point of view — and software tools can usually reverse the process. But today’s data recovery technology as practised by companies like Stellar, goes far beyond this... into the very innards of the storage medium, trying to administer a digital ‘kiss of life’ to data that is almost dead.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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