Data access and recovery solutions for servers

Daily work performance of employees depends on server efficiency a great deal. A server is a truly permanent location of the most critical information: indeed, users' commercial data, backup copies, corporate database and other information infrastructure are stored on servers.

A server is considered to be a reliable information storage device. Its reliability is achieved by means of back up operation as well as RAID arrays use. The latter being a method of providing data redundancy allows to recover data from disk crashes by spreading or duplicating data across multiple disc drives. Thus, as for reliability usual hard disc drives are incomparable with RAID arrays.

However, RAID technology has some drawbacks. Even those companies that use RAID arrays configurations with good fault tolerance can face RAID failure. In most cases its main cause is a crash of the number of disc drives that makes failed RAID reconstruction impossible. Alternatively, operating system failures, hardware faults and human errors can result in corruption of a logical data structure too. In addition to this, a possibility of RAID controller failure should be taken into account as well.

All these unfavorable factors can lead to partial or complete loss of data stored on a disc drive system. Data loss can take place despite hot spare servers and back up are applied. In fact, these means of data protection are likely to be inefficient in the event of data loss. For example, due to some reason a backup copy can not be recovered or the mission-critical information received between cycles of backup appears to be lost.

As a result, precious data loss can have a negative influence on orders processing speed, throw obstacles in the way of meeting terms of agreements and therefore can result in low-quality management of the departments concerned.

Sadly, there is no hardware or software that makes data 100% secure from loss.

If a server comes to a standstill due to data loss UFS Explorer can help to recover lost information in the following situations:

• data deletion caused by software faults or human errors
• data loss on a failed server file system due to hardware or software errors
• data loss following the logical hard drive failure or RAID malfunction
• data loss caused by RAID controller failure
• data loss caused by RAID disc drives crash under condition of sufficient redundancy

When a hard drive suffers from file system damage (accidental deletion of system files, file system structure corruption) the data remains on a hard drive, even though an operating system considers it inaccessible. It means that a hard drive is physically healthy, but file system structure or partitions table is damaged of modified. The possible reasons for such crash might be software errors, unexpected system shutdown, power outages. As for human errors, they include accidental deletion of important system files, unintentional hard drive formatting and deletion of hard drive partition.

Logical hard drive failure on an affected server can be fixed very easily with UFS Explorer software. Designed to meet users' different data recovery needs it carries out data retrieval from server hard drives. Besides, it should be noted that UFS Explorer supports most widely operating systems used on modern servers.

UFS Explorer software is capable to recover data in the event of RAID hardware malfunctions as well.

Despite being considered highly fault-tolerant, RAID does fail. It happens due to such component failures as RAID controller which is responsible for managing physical disc drives and presenting them to a server as logical units. Since RAID controller is sensitive to power supply quality it can fail by reason of voltage jumps. The principal outcome of RAID controller crash is inability to read files from disc system or even a computer startup fail.

Thus, in case of RAID controller failure UFS Explorer helps to make virtual reconstruction of RAID. Most commonly applied RAID configuration types as well as principal data placement algorithms are successfully supported by UFS Explorer software.

Data loss over other RAID components failures is not a rare event either. As a rule, it is RAID controller that ensures the continuous work of a RAID array in a situation that involves RAID malfunctions. Sufficient redundancy of an affected array is the only condition required. In the above mentioned circumstances not always a server affected by failed RAID components runs smoothly. Basically, it is due to RAID controller inability to identify a RAID array.

A virtual reconstruction of RAID with the help of UFS Explorer enables virtually to assemble array discs, even though some of RAID components are crashed. Therefore, it allows to recover data lost on a crashed disc.

Data lost on such types of RAID arrays as RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 7 can be easily recovered by means of UFS Explorer if only one disc fails. RAID 6 is an exception as our software is able to yield positive recovery results in a situation where two discs of RAID 6 fail. For RAID 1 one safe disc is enough to retrieve lost data. More robust fault-tolerant RAID arrays as well as mixed RAID arrays (RAID 10, RAID 0+1, RAID 50 and so on) can also be effectively reconstructed using UFS Explorer products.

In case of multiple failed RAID drives a company specializing in data recovery from crashed storage media is the one possible solution. There you can find advanced data recovery tools as well as experienced technicians that can repair, recover and rebuild lost data from different types of RAID systems. Data recovery using nothing but software can lead to partial or total loss of data on RAID. It is highly recommended to follow this instruction.