At our company we had a backup system in place - or, to be more precise, we _thought_ we did. Our server was configured to archive and sync all our critical data to an offsite storage system in a facility in another state. This would have been a proper and safe way to backup our data - had the data actually been saved in a readable format!!! We never had anything bad happen until a week ago, so we never really needed to restore from any of our backups. We just kept backing up and thought everything was dandy, until our server died right under our noses one fine morning and we needed to get back up and running STAT. So we quickly switched to our failsafe server, downloaded our latest backup archive from our out-of-state repository, and tried to unpack it and -- IT DIDN'T WORK!!!! The archive COULDN'T BE READ!!
We phoned Secure Data Recovery Services and told them this was an EMERGENCY - we needed to recover either the unreadable archive, or the data from our failed server, whichever, but we needed it NOW.
What happened next I remember very clearly, because when you're bleeding money by the second, you tend to remember these things. Within 20 minutes, a courier came to pick up the server and haul it back to their facilities. Half an hour later, they phoned us to tell us they found the issue with the server, that they would be able to recover the data very soon. It took an hour for the next phone call, which was a very painful wait at the time, but looking back now, that was remarkably short. They were finished! We got a new, identical drive back with the data on it, which they helped us install into our server on site for us. We were back in business, just two hours after the incident!
Secure Data Recovery Services are great at what they do, very helpful, professional, and most importantly for us, very swift! And one more thing....
Do not place too much faith in backups, make sure they actually work before settling down.
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