[CentOS] Disaster recovery recommendations

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Fri, October 30, 2015 4:30 pm, Max Pyziur wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I have three drives; they are all SATA Seagate Barracudas; two are 500GB;
> the
> third is a 2TB.
>
> I don't have a clear reason why they have failed (possibly due to a deep,
> off-brand, flakey mobo; but it's still inconclusive, but I would like to
> find a
> disaster recovery service that can hopefully recover the data.
>
> Much thanks for any and all suggestions,

The first thing I would try to do (as someone has already suggested) is:
put drives one at a time into USB enclosure or USB to SATA adapter, and
try to mount them on sane machine. If you can access drives (you may need
to run fsck before everything), check dmesg to see if the drives produce
errors every so often, check SMART (google is your friend). And if there
is suspicion the drive may die soon, copy its content elsewhere.

If the drives are indeed dead (say, other drives in the enclosure work,
these don't), you may indeed need to contact professional recovery
services. They are expensive. In USA and Canada the recovery may cost over
$800. If you have to do things this way (say, it were your family photos,
never backed up) and you are in USA or in Canada, ask me off the list,
I'll give you references of companies I know are good. They were used by
people I know personally, so you can trust (I do) to what I've heard about
them. I do not have my own experience with professional data recovery
services: my plan is: I have a good backup.

If you are going to look for recovery services yourself, I would suggest:

1. stay away from those who charge "evaluation fee" - these are the guys
who likely can only solve trivial cases, which you can solve yourself.

2. Use only well known companies (if you don't value your data, just
forget the whole thing)

3. The companies I would trust are those who only charge you if they
successfully recovered your data. They live off actual result, that means
they _can_ do it. That said, one shouldn't expect 100% recovery (but it is
often almost 100% indeed), but score like 90% recovery will be very good
in my book.

Good luck!

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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