The end of the world might not be nigh but if it's the end of the financial year and you cannot restore your backup, then it might well feel like it is.
Vogon specialises in Tape Data Recovery when your drive or software fails.
We have developed, both in-house and in conjunction with manufacturers, an unrivalled range of hardware and software tools to deal with almost every situation. If your data is there, we will recover it.
Tape is used as a sequential storage medium. It is not suited to
random access operations but provides an effective, high capacity
and yet low-cost solution to the problems of securing your data.
As with anything else, things can go wrong.
One potential problem with sequential storage media is that
a problem at one point along the tape might prevent access to
areas of well recorded data further along the tape. A recording
error or media flaw during the early part of a UNIX tar backup
will prevent you from being able to restore data from the remainder
of the set.
A tape drive assumes that the last thing you recorded is the most
recent thing that you want to be able to retrieve. Once recording
is completed, a tape drive records an end-of-recorded-media indicator
and no commercially available drive will allow access to any area
beyond this point. Even if access was permitted by the drive,
your backup software would not know what to do with any data that
it found as vital information would have been overwritten.
Removable media devices have to conform with specifications in
order that they can read data from media written in other drives.
Any DDS2 DAT drive, for example, should be able to read data
from a 120m DAT cartridge that has been written by another drive.
If a drive mechanism begins to wear then recording could take
place outside the positions that allow interchangeability. When
that drive finally fails and is replaced, none of the more recent
tapes can be read.
Damaged
tape
Snapped or creased
A creased or crumpled tape will have sustained data loss. Your drive
will not allow access to data from beyond the damage, even from
areas where there is perfect tape. Vogon will recover ANY data from
undamaged areas of tape, and often even from areas where there is
some apparent damage.
Fire or Flood?
Water damaged tape can have sustained damage due to pollutants
or from corrosion of the tape mechanism. Any attempt to read the
tape will probably result in further damage to both tape and drive.
Vogon has extensive experience of these problems and can prepare
your tape so that further data loss is prevented and an optimal
recovery is achieved.
Fire or extreme heat will cause data loss and might result in
a failure of the tape mechanism. Any attempt to read from the
tape will fail and might cause the tape to snap or become wound
inside the drive mechanism. Our painstaking approach and expertise
have recovered data from tapes damaged by even severe fires.
Media
Error/Restore fails
The words 'READ ERROR' or 'READ FAILURE' appear on the screen
and you cannot recover the remainder of your backup set. At Vogon
we will read all unaffected areas of the tape and then, by using
our in-house software tools or by writing bespoke code, we will
restore the files from your tape.
Media errors can result from drive problems, wear and tear and
dirt within the drive.
Other
Over the years Vogon have dealt with problems from the minor to
the catastrophic.
If you cannot find your problem detailed within these pages
we can still help you.
Phone us on +44 (0) 1869 355255 and speak with the experts.
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Vogon International Limited. All rights reserved.
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