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Fileservers, Application Servers, Mail Servers, Web Servers, NAS devices (Quantum
SNAP, Dell Power Vault etc..) and just plain Servers form the backbone of many corporations'
business records storage. There may be one hard drive or many, configured together
in volumes spanning drives or striped across drives, on permanent hard drives or
removable media.
Windows NT and Windows 2000 are the most popular Operating Systems for servers today
but we see many NetWare, Apple, Solaris, HPUX, and linux servers as well. ActionFront
Data Recovery Labs technicians are intimately familiar with server hardware from
IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Sun hardware as well as numerous others.
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1. Examples of Data Loss Situations - UNIX / Linux
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Naturally, the individual media in Servers suffer from the same failure points as
do drives in personal computers and workstations.
The increased complexity of many server operating systems results in additional
loss situations:
- Server registry configuration lost
- Intermittent drive failure resulting in configuration corruption
- Multiple drive failure
- Accidental replacement of media components
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2. The Recovery Process
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ActionFront Data Recovery Labs technicians treat Server and RAID loss situations
as high priority cases. An initial diagnosis determines whether each media device
is accessible to our lab equipment. If so, the first priority is to create a raw
image of all data from accessible media onto ActionFront media so that logical analysis
can determine the nature of the data loss situation.
If some of the media is inaccessible our lab will test the components and closely
examine its internal health to determine the extent of physical damage.
Recovery of crashed hard disks often involves replacing failed or damaged components
in a clean environment and using specialized hardware and software tools to create
the raw image. Failed components typically include electronics, read/write heads,
head assemblies, magnets & drive motors.
Logical recovery uses the raw images of all the server's media by examining the
low-level data sectors. Technicians must determine both the exact layout of volumes
which span or are striped across multiple drives and what fixes to filesystem structures
are needed to get access to the important data.
Multiple-drive servers are typically 'destriped' onto ActionFront media so that
filesystem repairs can be performed and the data files extracted. Sometimes the
existing filesystem structures are missing or damaged so much that data has to be
extracted directly from one or more fragments of the destriped image.
ActionFront Data Recovery Labs programmers have created a full set of software tools
used by our technicians to analyze, destripe, fix & recover data from raw image
drives from all operating systems. Once a recovery has been successfully performed,
file lists are created and data validity is checked.
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3. Recovery Pricing for UNIX / Linux Servers
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ActionFront's Labs have recovered from thousands of these devices over the years.
As you may expect, no two data recovery scenarios are identical in all respects.
Therefore, this uniqueness makes it impossible to give a realistic indication of
pricing without knowing all the facts for a particular case. Generally speaking,
pricing starts at about $2000.00 and goes up from this point.
Over the phone, our highly trained Customer Service Consultants will be able to
give you some idea of what pricing you would be looking at given your particular
configuration and set of circumstances. Sending in your media for a no obligation
evaluation will give us all of the information we would require to give you a firm
quotation for the recovery of your data.
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4. Turn-Around Time
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ActionFront has geared its entire service to recover your data as fast as possible.
When dealing with such a wide variety of problems, estimating time before the problem
is diagnosed is difficult. That is why each recovery case starts with a diagnostic evaluation.
The evaluation is started immediately on receipt of the media and generally
takes 2 to 48 hours to complete. The process involves several hours of work and
testing.
Complete recovery turn-around time including analysis and recovery is usually between
1 and 5 days. Some severe cases can take considerably more time.
Our hours of operation are 9am to 7pm EST Monday to Friday (All Labs), 9am to 5pm
Saturday (Toronto Lab only). If you have an emergency situation, we have technical
staff on call for weekends and after hours in all locations.
Time estimates are based on procedures and expertise required to recover the data
you require. You are not charged by the hour. A firm quote is provided for your
approval following the evaluation.
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5. Operating Systems and File Systems
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Intel Platforms
Unix Operating systems including:
SCO OpenServer and Xenix,
UnixWare from Novell and SCO,
Solaris,
Linux with ext2fs, xfs, reiserfs & jfs filesystems on standalone & RAID volumes,
BSD-based systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, BSDI,
LynxOS,
QNX.
Non-Intel Platforms
Unix Systems including:
Solaris on Sun/SPARC equipment, with ufs and Veritas VxFS filesystems
HPUX on Hewlett-Packard workstations with hfs and Veritas VxFS filesytems
on standalone and LVMvolumes,
IRIX on SGI workstations with efs and xfs filesystems,
VMS & OpenVMS running on Compaq & DEC equipment using ODS filesystems,
AIX on IBM RS/6000 with jfs filesystems on LVM volumes.
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6. Preserving your Warranty
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ActionFront has established agreements with most manufacturers regarding preserving
warranty during data recovery service. See List of Manufacturers.
If your manufacturer is not in the list, please call as ActionFront has agreements
with additional manufacturers which have requested us not to post their company
name.
If the seals on a media must be broken in order to extract data, ActionFront will
re-seal the media upon completion of service with a tamper resistant sticker which
the manufacturer will accept for warranty purposes. You will also receive an invoice
receipt to indicate you have pursued data recovery services with ActionFront.
When in doubt, enquire with the manufacturer about keeping your warranty while pursuing
data recovery.
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Critical Response Services
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If you have a critical situation and need immediate help, Call Us. The Critical Response Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In Lab Service
This service is for mission critical data recovery, where the media can be taken to one of our labs. In the lab, dedicated resources and critical response team members are committed round the clock to your recovery case until its resolution.
Onsite Service Q
This service is available for situations where immediate shipping to one of our labs is not feasible or desirable. A tech or team of techs can be dispatched to stabilize and analyze the circumstances of your failure. Response is as fast as it takes to catch the next plane to your location. This service is not for everybody but if you have a situation that merits this level of service, ActionFront is ready to help.
The Critical Response Team is comprised of our best data recovery technicians. They are called on for every kind of situation imaginable from multiple drive multi-Gigabyte and Terabyte RAID servers , Jukeboxes, custom installations and configurations, SQL Database corruption, to tape failure and custom file extraction from corrupted backup sets. Whatever the situation, these techs are ready to help.
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