Disaster recovery solutions

[Katheryn Cowling]

Hello, guys! I need some help, Our company had an accident last month that cause us to lose all our data and online e commerce applications, it cost us massive amount of money to put everything back to normal. I am now searching for disaster recovery service that can help us form a plan, a kind of disaster recovery solutions to assist us through the unexpected. Can someone provide me a list of companies that are proficient experts to create our plan? We would like to be ready in case another tragedy occurs. Any suggestion will be really much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Katheryn - Thank you joining. While some of our members may have experience with this (eg, Hoogle ?), I've never seen this topic discussed on this forum. Usually we stick pretty close to issues specifically related to Photoshop and other Adobe products, so have bit of patience and you may get lucky. I'm sure you have already posted similar questions on other discussion forums that have more of a computer and networking focus.

The largest (computer) disaster recovery system I ever was involved with was about 15 years ago. It was a small scientific workgroup (only ~ 20 people), and I implemented a very simple, nerds-only-need-apply (LOL) type of solution: I got everyone to use Subversion (primarily a version control system for software development) and then periodically backed up the Subversion server, including rotating off-site backups. It worked extremely well for us, but doesn't sound at all appropriate for your needs and more modern times.

The best of luck to you.

Tom M

 

[Kathleen Fox]

I guess there are some service providers that can give you so much assistance with this scenario. Look up the net, I am sure you will find a lot. I can't advertise our provider though.

 

[Tom Mann]

I'm glad you realize that this is a Photoshop forum, and if your reason for being here is to endorse a company, it will be considered spamming the forum and will be dealt with harshly.

Tom Mann
Moderator

 

[dv8_fx]

Welcome to the forum, Catheryn....

What volume or type of needs does your company have? Where are you located? Depending on geography, there are a few providers who provide backup to multiple geographically disperse datacenters. I ran across an article specific to disaster recovery that may be of interest to you (Azure backup services) Announcing Backup of Windows 10 machines using Azure Backup | Microsoft Azure Blog

What do you think of it .....

 

[Zeealex]

isn't there like a local phonebook or something that you can use? or google? I mean, come on, in all of the time you took to write out that thread, you could have googled at least 10 local disaster recovery companies and got a quote from all 10 of them. asking a photoshop forum on disaster recovery solutions without giving us a location it's a wee bit illogical...

Meh, just my 2 cents in passing

 

[Hoogle]

WARNING ESSAY ALERT​

As I was mentioned I will step in. 90% of datarecovery is a con most types of recovery you can do yourself and then their isspecialist recovery which costs a fortune.

I willexplain common more basic methods of recovering data but bare in mind it is notclear what your actual problem is ie a failed hard drive / corrupt partition,windows 10 upgrade. Server crash for website etc... And then I willprovide a few steps to prevent data loss in future with common forms of backingup.

I dealwith Data Recovery on a daily Basis the most common 1 lately is windows 10 freeupgrade and wiping personal data even though it states it will not do such athing when you click yes please upgrade me...

Easiestsolution is to navigate to file explorer > C Drive you will see a bunch offolders like program files, windows etc usually the bottom the folder is calledwindows.old if you have upgraded from windows 8 - 8.1 or windows 7/8/8.1 towindows 10. if you double click that folder you will see another set of folderslike previous program files windows etc. If you double click the Users folderand then your account name ie hoogle if your account name would be my name(remember this will be the original name you setup account with and will notshow current name if you have renamed an original account. Once in the accountyou should be able to see common folders with data in iedesktop/downloads/documents/pictures/music/videos. If your data is there thenjob done copy it over to somewhere you can locate. You may need to giveyourself permission to access the user accounts windows may pop up and say youdo not have permission to access this folder would you like to gain access justsay yes/continue.....

Ok thatis the easy method over and done if that fails you need to go a bit moretechnical...

If it waswindows 10 and you can boot up to your logon screen or further but still haveproblems then do not log on instead bottom right corner you will see a powerlogo to shutdown/sleep/restart if you click restart whilst holding down theshift key and keep holding it until you get a blue screen come up with a menu.

You canthen go through trouble shoot > advanced options > more options >restore previous build of windows. This will remove the windows 10 upgrade andhopefully restore your previous OS prior to the upgrade.

If youcan not get to windows logon screen and you are getting the windows 10 blackscreen of death as we have nicknamed it where it starts booting to windows 10but all you get is a black screen with just a cursor and have not constantlygiven up waiting and forced your computer to power off by the power button thenyou may get lucky after approx 30 - 50 mins depending on the power of your CPUyou may find windows will resume loading, this is a bug in windows 10misidentifying your Graphics card and fixes itself after sometime. if you havecorrupted your bootsector or os config by powering off then chances are it willnot fix itself. Instead get a windows 10 or windows 8 install DVD or memorystick depending which is your current OS and boot from it. You can get hold ofa genuine disc by making it yourself however you will need a computer withinternet access to do so, I carry a multiboot USB stick with all boot programsand OS on it but you can make a single use disk/usb and a windows repair diskusing microsoft media creationkit http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10
Here youneed to boot from this if it is a laptop or PC then as soon as your computerpowers on you should be able to keep tapping f12 for boot device menu. Asuslatops are Escape key Asus PC/motherboards ar F8 on bios if you have alenovo/ibm there is usually a 1 key recovery button next to power buttonsimilar to undo button within microsoft office sony has assist button all thesewill bring up boot device menu (do not go to factory reset you will make itharder for yourself.) Acers may need you to press F2 to go into bios and enableF12 boot menu option.

Anywayboot from device usb or DVD depending what version you used to make windowsinstall media and follow wizard until it comes up with install windows insteadclick the repair windows link at the bottom and that will bring up the bluemenu as discussed earlier and proceed from their.

Ok sostill not fixed your problem ??

Here weare getting to a more technical issue but still simple to follow if you havelittle IT knowledge.

Windowsdoes not boot. or hard drive is saying unallocated space/ corrupted partitionor computer is freezing on bios screen and locking up beyond any user input.

Couldmean mechanical failure on Hard drive or power failure to Solid state drive.
Create anUbuntu Live CD/USB sounds scary using linux but not so hard that you have tounderstand terminal etc newer builds are even easier to use
http://www.ubuntu.com/download YOu can browse many tutorials on creating an ubuntu live dvd/USB.
Now youneed to boot from this like you may have tried with the windows creation kithowever trying to make a uefi version of Ubuntu is a lot harder so easiest wayis to create normal and change some settings in Bios. Windows 8/8.1/10 usesUefi secure boot so will only boot using uefi compatable boot discs the wayround this is if you enter bios on boot usually via pressing F2 or Del key whenyou first turn on your computer under advanced settings or boot options youwill see an option for (all computers are different but based on the same)Legacy Boot Disable change that to enabled you may only be able to do that ifyou Disable secure boot first..... then boot up via your media with ubuntu onUSb/DVD

OnceUbuntu loads it will give you the option to install or Try Select Try you nowhave a portable OS not installed also called a live cd you can get manyversions but I find Ubuntu to be the best and easiest as it reads rawpartitons. But you can also try fedora/mint/debian/windows xp live/windows 7live etc but try to avoid windows as they only read NTFS or Fat32 Partitionsand will misread corrupted partitions as blank hard drives or worse only readyour boot partition as 100mb hdd.

Anywaywithin Ubuntu you should see on the left hand side assuming you have defaultlayout towards the bottom of the menu attached storage devices.
rememberwindows allocates its own drive letters so dont just look for C; and assumewindows is installed there. look for names like windows/ recovery/data if yousee windows then click it and see if it opens a file navigator with programfiles/windows/users etc if you do not see those 3 folders and more then it isnot the drive windows is installed on so try another 1. until you get to USersand then your account name copy all data from your account excluding appdatafolder.onto a portable hard drive/usb pen.

If you donot see a drive with windows on then at the top of the left hand side menu goto search and type in Disk this will bring a disk manager program and will letyou mount any partitions that did not mount automatically. it may take upto 10mins for ubuntu to find all drives especially if you plug in a storage devicewhilst in ubuntu.

Good newsis ubuntu does not recognise windows file structures or security so will copylarge amounts of data a lot faster than if you were in windows.
will alsoread mac drives etc

Ok so nowyou have tried all the main software approaches but still can not get to yourdata due to disk being formatted or failed you have more options but willrequire a computer with windows on as it is the easiest software and ability toconnect hard drive to that computer if you can use a pc tower and add a satacable and power to connect the hard drive from failed machine that is yourfastest option however you can put your failed hard drive to a dock or caddyand run it like an external hard drive. If it is a pc your trying to recoverbuy a new Hard drive they are about $50 dollars and install windows onto thatdoes not need to be licensed your only using it for a few days maximum and youget 30 day trial. Also install windows 10 if possible as it is better at HDDdetection and resolves corrupted partitions better.

 

[Hoogle]

Now you can install recovery software these will work on working hard drives/sd cards/usb pens/external hard drives faulty hard drives but can not guarentee all faulty drives can be scanned. Also depending on the level of data recovery needed it may only be able to scan for raw data which is a last resort and a bugger as it will rename all your files to 1 upto last file per document type and not have any structure or your original file names.

However even if drive is faulty you may get option to browse it like normal and recover data to current drive or attached drive.

I must stress the only good recovery software I have found to be consistant and reliable is paid for software.

R-Media is my favourite recovery software it will scan the drive and retain the structure and file names/folders etc. However it can be slow on scanning broken hard drives and it can take a couple of days to scan and not find anything

Stellar pheonix data recovery works very well like R-Media but offers more options depending on the version you buy but will do deeper scans/ raw data scans and unpowered scans ie if your hard drive is a mechanical failure it only powers the drive enough to read it and does not power it up to 5400RPM/7200RPM so be warned if you have to use this depending on the size of your hard drive it can take days to scan

fairly stable free software can be found here
http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

if that works but not everything recovered then it may be worth investing in a premium software.

Please note Data recovery software will recover a hell of a lot more than you may think down to every picture you have ever viewed online pics/videos you may have deleted years ago etc private bank statements from 5 years ago etc. even if you have formatted your drive reinstalled windows and thought it was gone it can be recovered possibly.

Another option is cloning a drive if you have a spare hard drive you can clone/mirror it and that may fix it all for you this basically takes 1 drive and copies it like for like onto another drive it does not have to be a fully working drive your copying from but many drives that have failed and will not boot to windows can be cloned and problem fixed.
Look for programs like acronis true image this is my preferred cloning tool it lets you make a bootable disc so you can clone from its own mini OS


Website loss
well you may be screwed depending on your hosting package/supplier but many these days do regular back ups and you can restore a website from a backup within your control panel these back up frequencies will be either 24 hours or weekly and will zip them up and keep x amount of copies replacing older copies with newer copies. This may be an optional upgrade and may not include database backup just front end.

if you are on shared hosting you should be able to set this up via control panel if not automatically done if you are using a dedicated server you can set a cron job to do it and even send it to somewhere like amazon cloud or dropbox just restore from a back up.


Future prevention and backing up
Backing up can be expensive but worth it or cheap if you do not mind putting in some work to back up.

I have an extensive back up and fail safe backup and can have upto 12 backups at any 1 time all at a click of a button and automatic everyday at a particular time I set.

here is my backup procedure for auto backing up

PC 1 Cdrive I have a folder called backup and I have everything in that folder that is important to me ie client projects. using this software it backs up whatever is in that folder and subfolders

D Drive

Z Drive

P drive

all random letters which does not matter my c drive is 1tb Solid state drive Z drive is another solid state drive (they are suppose to be more reliable than mechanical drives but only time will tell

P and D drive are server grade Hard drives which are more expensive but western digital black will be sufficient

using Karens Replicator which is a free backup software which I love but you can use microsoft sync toy both retired software but both still work very well
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/karens_replicator.html
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=15155


You can create backup actions to local drives and network drives
so for example i set my backup folder on c drive to sync to a folder called backup on d drive P drive Z drive etc so I have 4 folders called backup on PC 1 so if any drive fails I have 3 more copies

replace 1 drive and copy it over

I also have a nas drive which is a network drive this is the expensive part a good quality nas drive with good HDDs in can cost hundreds- thousands of dollars

Nas drive with 2 or more bays in basically means whatever you put on 1 drive will automatically copy onto other drives I have a 4 bay drive and have it set to mirror onto all 4 drives so if 1 drive fails I chuck it away and put a new drive in and the nas box will clone my backups onto it

Karens replicator will backup to nas drives however mcrosoft synctoy can be funny about it.

on 1 of my backup drives on my PC is also a google drive drive cloud back up so a copy goes to google drive
another drive has dropbox
another drive has microsoft skydrive
and my main drive has my own cloud based setup online to 1 of my dedicated servers using software called owncloud which is open source cloud based software which you can host on your own server with unlimited storage !!! cheap but reliable as drop box gets expensive with more data etc

so my karens replicator looks like this

C drive backup folder copies to D, P Z
in backup 2 copies to D, P, Z drive cloud back up folders which then syncs to cloud backup
Backup 3 copies to Nas drive 1 which then copies to disk 2,3 and 4
Backup 3 will copy only when I plug in my 2 USB Hard drives via USB these are hard copies and should only be plugged in when I want a master backup and can not be automatically copied to as they are not connected.

The hard backup master copies are purely for the reason that my backup is literally automatic if I delete 1 file in my c drive backup folder it will sync to all folders and cloud based backups including nas drives hence the master backup on an unconnected drive.


CHeap alternative to NAS drives all though still considered as 1 are seagate network drives and Western Digital lifebooks both offer similar feature just not as good quality as true nas boxes you can even remote access these drives from anywhere in the world as long as you have internet access.


If you want to back up your whole computer with all your programs installed etc then google windows 7 image back up for plenty of tutorials also available in windows 8/8.1/10

or use software like acronis true image which will also give you a boot key such as F4 so if you get a virus etc then you can turn on your computer press F4 or F5 cant remember the exact key and it will do a factory reset on your machine but with the image you created originally very useful if like me you have lots of big programs installed with lots of plugins and programs like filezilla ftp client with hundreds of saved ftp connections saved on it etc.


Well if you have read all this congratulations way to long for my liking but had to be thorough as I did not know your particular problem maybe someone can rewrite it and post it as a thread on its own.