When it comes to being asked to recover data from large systems running RAID - I always pass the work onto a competent company like Data Clinic's RAID recovery team. ICO compliant with your data security, their team retrieves the information from RAID systems (HP, Qnap, and NAS, running RAID 5, 6, 10 and 50, throughout most of the UK. Furthermore whilst I work on a 5-7 day schedule, Data Clinic have an emergency service that recovers data ASAP - sometimes the same day.
Here are 3 example enquiries I've had lately where Data Clinic were able to recover the client's files.
I have a server disk which one of our users has accidentally deleted approx. 70gb of data, which we now need recovered. The OS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 – 64bit
I have a Iomega 200D with 4 x 1TB Seagate SATA drives installed configured in a RAID 5 array. One of the drives has failed and we are no longer able to access the data on the device.
We've had our QNAP NAS fail recently and we need to copy the data from our drives. It's a 4x2TB setup with the 2nd bay appearing to be malfunctioning. We bought a new drive for that bay but it failed to mount and rebuild. This means that the drives are probably all in good shape but the NAS itself is non-functioning. Can someone come have a look ASAP please, it's extremely urgent that we have this data copied over to a new drive.
Data Clinic's RAID recovery team are based in Manchester and London but also recover data across the UK, still on an emergency (same day) service.
I'm sometimes asked why I don't handle RAID data recovery work myself - the answer is simple: RAID is a very complex type of data storage where files are stored in segments across all the hard drives in the RAID array - this data once recovered, has to be pieced back together rather like a patchwork quilt - this is a very skilled job that is beyond the capabilities of most, including me, therefore that's why I leave it up to Data Clinic.