Backup Anytime

You may recall the facebook data breach (not the most recent one) in March. This involved users photos becoming visible to logged on user. face book resolved this issue resulting in a “now you see me, now you don’t” scenario. The global coverage of the issue seems to have been taken with a pinch of salt by users who may en masse have decided that the coverage of the breach related more to the size of facebook than it did the severity of the breach.

This may have therefore passed as a “data outage blip” had not a more recent and arguably more serious breach occurred towards the end of July. This involved the data of birth of users being visible to anyone on line until the problem was resolved.

Given that many people use a number of social networking sites, partial data breaches on an individual membership basis are very serious. Lets say for example if your facebook membership provides fraudsters with a picture of you and your date of birth (coupled with any information you willingly provide) and this relates to facebook breaches to date so remember more may come. That information may or may not be enough to make you a victim of fraud. If it is not, it will surely make you an attractive option to fraudsters as they have some personal information pertaining to you in their possible victim database.

Add to this any other breaches at other social networking sites of which you are a member and you can see the cumulative effect of “data protection blips” can be very serious indeed. As a consequence of all of this, many users are providing false personal information (partially at least) when they join social networking sites. One knock on effect of this is the inaccuracies in social networking site data bases as to the advertising focus of membership. This reduces the validity of the advertising base and therefore the value to the social networking site.

In effect, data breaches always hurt the site responsible but often innocent parties suffer with them. In this case, facebook suffer credibility problems, potential sanction, the possibility of being sued and reduced future membership data accuracy resulting in reduced advertising value.

Other social networking sites however are tarred with the same brush and despite lesser consequences will suffer because of the concern another facebook breach brings to the industry.

The end users suffer from having to amend details, provide inaccurate details, remember the inaccurate details and potential being the victim of fraud or actual identity theft.

So, facebook suffer a loss of face, your face has been unwillingly found and everyone in the industry faces the consequences.

Please note that this information is provided to help inform people as to the outlook in varying data outage scenarios. We are not suggesting that you go it alone with any drive repair attempt.

If you have online backup and want to restore, contact us.

If you do not have online backup contact critical data recovery.

Many of our enquiries come from people who contact us after a data outage has occurred. Online backup is a not recursive issue and can only solve problems which occur after online backup is put in place.

We do however endeavour to assist or at least point these enquiries in the right direction. The most common issue is a failed hard drive. Clients with online backup (and a safely retained encryption) can run a disaster recovery installation on a replacement computer and restore all correctly selected and backed up data.

We are here however referring specifically to enquiries from people who do not have online backup and have suffered a data outage as a consequence of a drive failure.

An out and out drive failure is a case in which a drive has been physically damaged internally. This is a potentially non sortable scenario and can be expensive to even attempt to resolve. Thankfully, many (and most in our experience) drive failure reports do not actually refer to a drive failure but to a controller card failure and this is where we get to the Dell anomaly.

A drive which can not be seen in bios and which makes normal operational noises is likely OK and has a controller card issue.

Controller card model numbers are specific and there can be many revisions which need to be noted when seeking a replacement. Again, you are best leave this to CDR.

In the case of Dell (they are a very important exception given the quantity of systems they sell) , they use third party drives and often these drives have firmware ordered by Dell. This can mean that when you order a replacement controller board from the drive manufacturer or an agent for a Dell computer, that board many not work with the Dell.

Given than an attempt to use an incorrect board could further your woes and that any board replacement in an unsuitable environment could render the drive unreadable, do not attempt any of this yourself. This information is provided to assist you with gaining an insight in to possible scenarios and an understanding of what your chosen hard drive recovery expert may need to do.

Why do Dell use different controller board revisions?

There are a number of possible reasons for this. We will outline a few of the most commonly purported reasons on the Internet. Which ones are the actual reasons only Dell can know.

1. Increased performance relative to the system specification

Dell may have identified hard drive controller board characteristics which would enhance system performance and therefore requested the revisions from their drive suppliers.

2. Support simplification.

Individual drive and controller characteristics may prevent users from replacing even a functional drive with a less suitable drive and therefore reduce the likelihood of Dell support unknowingly trying with difficulty to provide technical support for a system with an unwarranted drive.

OEM protection

Dell computers come with preloaded software of the original equipment manufacturer variety. Purposely used controller board variations may render improper use of this software on other systems extremely difficult.

System restore verification.

Given the large and broad range of continually updating systems which Dell supply, this controller board revision implementation may assist restore software in identifying varying types of restore applicable to varying systems it can be used on.

In summary.

Not all reported drive failures are actual drive failures. Get online backup now, do not wait ’till it is too late. There is nothing wrong with learning about drive failure issues so you can have a better understanding about options and resolutions. It is important that you do not cross the line of assuming a DIY approach to any task which requires training you have not undertaken or an environment you do not have access to.

Despite scaremongering on the Internet about Dell third party hard drive revisions, these issues are easily resolved in more cases with Dell systems than most others given the quantity of drives manufactured for Dell and therefore the quantity of parts and availability of Dell and third party assistance.

It would seem hard to believe on the face of it that hard drive quality could fall. Given the increased sales and revenue, hard drive manufacturers should have the R&D and quality assurance in place to ensure quality increases if anything. There are however, some challenges to this assumption.

Falling prices reach quality turning point?
This argument is based on the theory that while profits may have not been affected negatively by falling prices due to greatly increased output, the actual price and profit per drive have reached a level which may continue to decrease but at which quality assurance contribution per drive is negligible and cost of production is so low that a high failure rate can be answered by any amount of honoured failed drive replacement claims. This obviously does not bode well for your data as you are not interested in a replacement drive. It is worth near nothing and is blank.

Technical improvements in every area bar quality?
This theory centres around just about all technical improvement being in the areas by which consumers choose to value hard drives. These area are based on drive size and speed. We all know the size of the hard drive in our computer. It is common to know the speed of your hard drive. But honestly, when is the last time you heard anyone in your local discuss mean time to failure rates of hard drives. The public gets what the public wants and cheap fast drives are not conducive to increased quality. The spin speed of a drive has to have an effect on the life of the drive. Also, a head crash scenario is compounded by the spin speed.

We are now expected to have a backup?
When the first home computers were sold, the hard drive cost considerably more then a full system would cost today (even allowing for inflation and system specification) and despite the infancy of the technology, failure rates seemed far less common than now. Were older, slower drives of superior quality?

Not likely. It would appear that the scale of computer usage, data quantities, system dependency and user familiarity is responsible for a lesser or worst case similar percentage of failures appearing to be far greater than they are.

The lesson to be learned from this is that you do not need a catastrophe to suffer a data outage. You just need a little bad luck and less backup. Don’t depend on luck. Backup. Backup. Backup. The no quibble replacement hard drive warranty will be honoured but the blank replacement wont do much for your honour.

All of this points to the importance of RAID. Backupanytime will launch NAZAV in July. NAZAV is a RAID network drive in a box. The NAZAV system may be used to turn any system into a network drive and facilitates replication and fail-over.