We manage a fairly large repository of ancient texts in archaic languages. We spent many years and thousands of dollars on digitizing these texts. Well, imagine that one day, we log into the system to find that our entire repository has been destroyed and the system was corrupt - at that point, we didn't know why, it looked like a virus, although we all knew that was very unlikely since these servers were used for nothing else but storing the digitized texts and allowing retrieval via HTTP. We were shocked and frustrated and referred to Secure Data Recovery Services right away.
They patiently worked with us to find out what the problem was. We told them about our infrastructure and showed them our log files from IIS and they almost immediately discovered what the problem was. We were running an outdated version of Windows Server which had a vulnerability, and that allowed a hacker to get access to our system and run a malicious script that corrupted the registry.
The next step was to recover the data we lost. We were very pleased with the experience. They kept us informed about what they were doing and what issues came up, and they patiently explained to us what everything meant. Ours was an exceptionally difficult case, since there was random sporradic corruption among ancient, non-English texts - obviously not very easy to tell what's intact and what's not! It was impossible to recover the data as a single contiguous bit stream, which would have been a quick operation - they had to do it on an individual file by file basis.
Due to the unique nature of the data we were working with, they had us work up close with them right in their office. We got to meet some of their engineers and technicians and actually see first hand what they were doing. It was a very illuminating experience. We were coming in for about a week while they recovered as much as they could. Many files were only partially intact, and some were gone completely. They were very helpful in organizing everything for us, categorizing the files according to the level of damage. In short, they recovered a good part, and they created a list of texts we would have to redigitize either completely or partially. They let us borrow the hard drives that stored the completely and partially recovered data until we were ready to copy them back to our servers.
They actually helped us secure our servers to make sure that this doesn't happen again. We updated to Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.5, and they gave us many helpful tips on how to keep intruders out. They also had us set up a more intelligent backup system that was off-site, which we didn't have before.
In conclusion, I would just like to say that I have never worked with a company as helpful and caring as Secure Data Recovery Services. They are experts in their field, and obviously treat each case on an individual basis. We are very pleased with Secure Data Recovery Services and would recommend them to anyone who finds themselves in the same boat.
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