A crashed server presents you with two major problems at the same time. Down time tells you to do anything possible right away and data tells you to touch nothing. This is a line we learned from twenty years of server recoveries for our clients in Glasgow. Protect your disks completely first (we mean no writes) and go as fast as the image creation will allow. Clients can live through days of down time but they cannot afford their payroll database to be rebuilt over.
If there's life in the box yet, shut it off properly. If it's dead then don't restart it. Take a picture of the bay(s) before you touch them, take nothing out of a hot system, and under no circumstances begin a rebuild. This includes going into the BIOS screen on the controller board, this includes using the vendor's utilities (if they exist), and this even includes "just seeing". After that dial us. That first ten minute time frame of talking to us is considered free triage. We will determine what has failed, we'll tell you what can be used safely, we'll give you an estimated time line for getting back up & running again, and finally we'll help you decide if purchasing a spot on our emergency track is worth the premium cost for your specific situation.
The things you would think are the best way to make progress in your recovery (i.e., reinstall the operating system on the array so that "something" will run again) are the worst possible things to do; they tend to cause much more harm than was caused by the initial failure.
Most of the time it follows the same format. The disks are quiet as they fail over time in a Dell PowerEdge or HP ProLiant. Because RAID does its job silently, nobody notices for months that there's been an issue with one of the drives until another starts to have issues. Or a well-meant rebuild causes all of the remaining drives to be stressed beyond their limitations. And then either the PERC or Smart Array controller has failed and wants to "initialise" before dying. Whether you're using SAS/SATA, hardware/software RAID, whether your host server uses Windows Server, VMware, or Linux, the repair process for each disk will always follow this exact order: each individual disk will be imaged. The array will be rebuilt virtually. The volume & database(s) will be repaired against copies.
Hot spares are copied as well. We have had instances where the "hot spare" was the only place there was a good copy of a stripe.
The process of recovering a server is not completed when all files are restored; it won't be completed until the business is running. Therefore, we tailor our output to fit the needs of recovery: the Exchange store and/or SQL database(s) are mounted to ensure data integrity; the VM files are prepared to deploy into a hypervisor; share structures and permissions are maintained if possible based on the file system capabilities of the original environment; the restored set is provided on encrypted media so that your IT team can restore the server themselves. If your engineers need a full account for their incident report, we'll give it to them in plain English.
The price for multi-disk work starts at £500 + VAT and is quoted to the job, as each individual member disk will need to be imaged prior to touching the array. This means that the more disks you have, the longer and therefore more careful the time we spend on the job. All work begins with a free diagnostic, and all work will conclude as quoted; this means that you will receive written confirmation of the price quote before a single sector of your data is accessed. On most jobs, there is nothing to pay unless your data returns. We do not charge by the hour, nor do we assess an evaluation fee or take a percentage of what the files are worth.
A rebuild went wrong, or a volume was lost after a controller replacement? The blog post about how each RAID level fails will explain what you have seen.
Quickly & safely: we begin creating an image of your disks as soon as your drives arrive, and run our emergency track during non-business hours (evenings/weekends) as long as there is sufficient justification for doing so. While we will certainly provide you with a realistic estimate of how much time we expect recovery will take prior to beginning work, we will never skip the imaging to save hours, as that sacrifices the data. Call first for that estimate.
Usually not: a failed rebuild process writes over portions of the disk while leaving other areas intact. In many cases the original state of the system prior to the rebuild can be recreated using the information contained within each drive that still has its original information. To be honest, results after a rebuild attempt are frequently partial. If a rebuild process has been attempted, please stop immediately, document what actions were taken and when those actions took place and forward everything including any replaced drives to our office.
Yes: on most business boxes, restoring access to the volume represents half the effort required to restore data. As such, we check the Exchange EDB stores, SQL Server MDFs and other databases to determine whether their failure resulted in either corrupted or damaged pages. Where needed, these databases are restored at a page by page level from the recovered images. This allows for successful mounting of the restored databases rather than simply having the data exist.
Only drives are necessary, which makes them easier to transport. Please remove the drives from the server, label each bay where the drive originally resided and pad each individual drive. We cannot accept complete servers. However, if physically removing the disks from the server proves to be difficult, contact us first. Regardless of how you choose to send them, please make sure to also send both the failed drive(s) and any replaced drive(s). It is common for "dead" members to contain the final stripe needed for data recovery.
Before you either post your server disks to us, or bring them into Tay House, we need to give you a quote for what we will charge. We can provide this quote over the telephone, or using the quote request form that we have provided here. In order to allow us to properly image the drives from your server, they must be removed from the server itself or enclosure prior to shipping (or bringing) them to us. Please label each drive with which bay it came from and only ship/send us the drives. From there, there are only two ways to get your drives to us, neither of which require van transportation. You may personally deliver your drives to Tay House, 300 Bath Street (right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8) at any time during the hours of 9am–5:30pm on any weekday, with no appointment needed. Alternatively, you may also package your drives securely so that they can withstand damage while being shipped and send them via tracked/insured post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands, or from any other location within the United Kingdom. Regardless of whether you elect to physically transport your drives to us or send them by post, all of the processing of your drives will take place in-house by our team of trained engineers, utilising a fully documented chain-of-custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
Photograph the bays, pull the disks, do nothing else, and contact us before allowing anyone else to touch your server. Server data recovery for Glasgow businesses: imaged exactly as evidence, delivered just like a plan for Monday morning, brought in by hand or insured post.