Investigating the costs involved when
disaster strikes is an undoubted motivation for setting up an iron clad
backup regime. Not only does it make you sleep easy at night it also
saves you money and potentially your business. Consider that on a long
enough timeline all digital storage devices fail, this includes traditional hard rives, solid state drives and portable flash memory.
In our experience, different storage targets can fail in different ways. Traditional hard drives are possibly more gracious in their failures. Spindle hard drives quite often give you warning signs that it's nearing its end of life. These signals can be monitored via S.M.A.R.T data that the hard drive provides. Factors such as spin up errors, bad sectors and reallocated sector counts can be strong indicators that a hard drive needs to be replaced. At Symmetric IT we monitor hard drive S.M.A.R.T data as part of our Managed IT service. If a failure signal is detected a hard drive will be replaced as a matter of policy. Prevention is better than cure.
Often if a hard drive fails it still possible to recover data from it using 3rd party software. As long as the hard drive is still detectable by Windows you have a good probability to get your data back. The worst case scenario is a non responsive hard drive. Quite often data can still be recovered but this is where it moves into the highly qualified expertise area. The hard drive can still be recovered in a clean room using specialized methods. The cost to recover also rises significantly.
A recent quote obtained from a data recovery specialist to recover data from a laptop hard drive that was non responsive:
Flash memory based storage devices, in our experience, fail less graciously. Solid state hard drives have a finite lifespan, determined by the amount of read and writes to the memory. More often than not they will fail before reaching this theoretical read/write limit. All the SSD failures we have encountered (across different brands) have been fairly sudden with little to no warning. Windows would glitch and then data would be lost, suddenly Windows wont boot or Windows would blue screen unexpectedly with different stop codes. Attempting to read data from the drive would fail.
In these cases data recovery is harder than on a traditional hard drive. Backups, more specifically image based backups of solid state drives is imperative.
USB flash drives also fail, and most we have come across fail suddenly with no warning at all. One day it will be OK, the next time you plug it in it's completely unresponsive.
Consider the following price layout from another data recovery company:
These prices reflect a successful recovery which means there are other aspects to consider as well:
A structured, monitored backup regime is needed. A simple backup every now and then is not enough. If the day comes a recent backup makes all the difference. Usually the more recent the better, every hour wasted redoing work is time and money lost.
Conversely a long history of backups is also important. All the difference can sometimes be made when recovering that one email or spreadsheet you had 5 years ago.
Symmetric IT prides itself on tried and tested backup regimes that can accommodate all disaster recovery scenarios and meet your time to recovery targets. Having a backup is not enough if it takes 2 days to get up and running again. Your backup needs 2 or more storage targets onsite, always separate, rotated and securely stored. These backups need to be secure(encrypted) and monitored. You also need secure offsite backups for critical data. Special care needs to be taken to cater for all line of business applications so that they backed up correctly in a way that allows for a successful restore.
Your backups also need to have full and granular restorability. For example, if need a specific file from a year ago it needs to be easily accessible. If your computer or server fails it needs to be recoverable in its entirety within set time limits; not just the latest version of the server either, quite possibly last week's or even last year.
Your backups also need to be tested, they are only as good as the last time they were tested. Symmetric IT has seen backups that run and verified successfully but when the time came to restore they failed.
In summary, your backups need the following considerations:
These
are all factors to consider when setting up a backup plan, Symmetric IT
can tailor a backup plan for you keep your most valuable digital assets
safe.
How do they fail?
In our experience, different storage targets can fail in different ways. Traditional hard drives are possibly more gracious in their failures. Spindle hard drives quite often give you warning signs that it's nearing its end of life. These signals can be monitored via S.M.A.R.T data that the hard drive provides. Factors such as spin up errors, bad sectors and reallocated sector counts can be strong indicators that a hard drive needs to be replaced. At Symmetric IT we monitor hard drive S.M.A.R.T data as part of our Managed IT service. If a failure signal is detected a hard drive will be replaced as a matter of policy. Prevention is better than cure.
Often if a hard drive fails it still possible to recover data from it using 3rd party software. As long as the hard drive is still detectable by Windows you have a good probability to get your data back. The worst case scenario is a non responsive hard drive. Quite often data can still be recovered but this is where it moves into the highly qualified expertise area. The hard drive can still be recovered in a clean room using specialized methods. The cost to recover also rises significantly.
A recent quote obtained from a data recovery specialist to recover data from a laptop hard drive that was non responsive:
So you are looking at a significant amount if the hard drive fails...Our fees, should you decide to proceed, would be quoted between $249 and $749
Flash memory based storage devices, in our experience, fail less graciously. Solid state hard drives have a finite lifespan, determined by the amount of read and writes to the memory. More often than not they will fail before reaching this theoretical read/write limit. All the SSD failures we have encountered (across different brands) have been fairly sudden with little to no warning. Windows would glitch and then data would be lost, suddenly Windows wont boot or Windows would blue screen unexpectedly with different stop codes. Attempting to read data from the drive would fail.
In these cases data recovery is harder than on a traditional hard drive. Backups, more specifically image based backups of solid state drives is imperative.
USB flash drives also fail, and most we have come across fail suddenly with no warning at all. One day it will be OK, the next time you plug it in it's completely unresponsive.
Consider the following price layout from another data recovery company:
| USB flash drives | $125 - 295 + GST |
| Phone recoveries | $199 - 399 + GST |
| Hard disk | $350 - $595 + GST |
| Specialized recoveries | $500 - $1500 + GST |
- What about the data that they cant recover?
- How much time will you lose recovering this data?
- What impact will this expenditure and loss of time have on your business?
- What impact will a loss of data have? (Financial data, Business databases)
How do I protect myself or my business?
A structured, monitored backup regime is needed. A simple backup every now and then is not enough. If the day comes a recent backup makes all the difference. Usually the more recent the better, every hour wasted redoing work is time and money lost.
Conversely a long history of backups is also important. All the difference can sometimes be made when recovering that one email or spreadsheet you had 5 years ago.
Symmetric IT prides itself on tried and tested backup regimes that can accommodate all disaster recovery scenarios and meet your time to recovery targets. Having a backup is not enough if it takes 2 days to get up and running again. Your backup needs 2 or more storage targets onsite, always separate, rotated and securely stored. These backups need to be secure(encrypted) and monitored. You also need secure offsite backups for critical data. Special care needs to be taken to cater for all line of business applications so that they backed up correctly in a way that allows for a successful restore.
Your backups also need to have full and granular restorability. For example, if need a specific file from a year ago it needs to be easily accessible. If your computer or server fails it needs to be recoverable in its entirety within set time limits; not just the latest version of the server either, quite possibly last week's or even last year.
Your backups also need to be tested, they are only as good as the last time they were tested. Symmetric IT has seen backups that run and verified successfully but when the time came to restore they failed.
In summary, your backups need the following considerations:
Multiple onsite storage targets
Offsite online encrypted backups
Line of business application considerations
Time to recovery target considerations
Encrypted and stored safely
Rotated to a set schedule
Actively monitored
Sector and image based considerations for backup types
Restorability considerations (full/granular)
Restorability testing
Documented procedures
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