Data Recovery Newsletters - November 2005

DR Engineers versus DR Software – Why People Matter

When data loss occurs, there are many options available for recovery. What’s the difference between data recovery software and using a professional recovery firm? You see “Data Recovery” all over the Internet, so what is the best course of action? This month’s technical article will focus on the pros and cons of data recovery software versus the human touch! Read the complete article and discover why working with Ontrack’s experienced engineers is always an advantage.

Ontrack Teams with OSTA to Provide Free Photo Recovery for Hurricane Victims

As Gulf Coast residents begin the cleanup process after the recent hurricanes, digital photos are among the possessions that people will go to great lengths to salvage. While CDs and DVDs could be easily transported before the storms arrived, many people did not have the option of saving photos that were stored only on hard drives. In order to help them with the rebuilding process, Ontrack Data Recovery is teaming up with the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) to provide home users affected by the hurricanes with free recovery of digital photos in the .JPG format through the end of November. Read the complete press release

Data Recovery – It’s More Than Just a Restore
In a recent Associated Press article, the topic of data recovery was highlighted in relation to how small businesses are preparing for disasters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The article begins by noting how business has picked up at “data recovery services” over the past few weeks and goes on to mention companies that provide backup solutions and data restoration.

While the services these companies provide are definitely valuable for any business’ data backup planning, they do not provide true data recovery in the sense of recovering data from damaged storage media. These types of businesses can only restore data that was previously backed up, not actually recover missing data that was never backed up – or even backups that were similarly damaged in a disaster. This is an important distinction because confusion on the topic of
what “data recovery” means could lead some people to misunderstand their own chances for recovering data after a disaster.

Although the article does a good job in advertising backup services as excellent proactive strategies for protecting a business against data loss, it does a disservice by failing to mention the options available with true data recovery performed by companies like Ontrack. Just because the data was not backed up doesn’t mean that it is inaccessible. Since many companies will find themselves in the position of not having backups after a disaster, or having backups that
aren’t useful due to an extended backup window, it is crucial that they understand the difference between the two. Misconceptions about the options available after losing data can waste valuable time and money. Your relationship with Ontrack Data Recovery gives you options beyond backup and restore – helping you stay protected no matter what type of data disaster you encounter.

Ontrack® PowerControls™ 4.0 is here!

Ontrack® PowerControls™ 4.0 software, the newest version of the widely used mailbox recovery tool, is now available. This upgraded version helps Microsoft Exchange administrators save time and deliver better recovery performance, and offers expanded backup format support for CommVault® Galaxy™ and UltraBac Software.

Other new features:

• Advanced Searching – Allows users to search within attachment text for user-defined keywords or phrases
• Public Folders as Target – Allows users to open public folders as a target for public folder or message restores
• Reporting Feature – Provides statistical analysis on any combination of stores completely offline from your production Exchange Server
• Multiple Search Session Capabilities – Users will have the ability to search using different criteria on any combination of stores simultaneously
• Save Search Criteria – Users can save search criteria to a file for later retrieval
  

Visit www.ontrack.com/powercontrols to learn more about the newest version of PowerControls software!

Customers Say it Best

Graduate school requires a great deal of time, hard work and dedication – not to mention the volumes of data necessary to complete a degree. Imagine the shock and despair of graduate student Jaclyn Novatt, who experienced two systems failures within 24 hours, putting her future degree in serious jeopardy. Like a student cramming for an exam, Ontrack Data Recovery was on the job, working tirelessly to rescue her data. In the end, Novatt got her
data back and Ontrack received high marks for the result:

"I am a graduate student, starting my fourth year of my program. My laptop hard drive crashed, and then 23 hours later my backup external hard drive crashed. That was 3 years of data that I could no longer access digitally - I was in a panic! Ontrack was incredible. They worked non-stop to get my laptop hard drive to start imaging. When they finally got the thing to image, I think the engineers performed a small miracle! I was able to recover nearly all of my data. Thank you all so much!"

- Jaclyn Novatt , The Rockefeller University