The Intricate Process of Raid Data Protection

RAID data protection is possibly one of the most intricate processes any data recovery software can do. More often than not, the problems are doubled by the actions of the users prior to sending the drives in for recovery protection. Many clients feel that it is necessary to try and protect the data themselves or repair the array through different system utilities, and this may be fine if the data is not crucial. However, it has been experienced by many that when you have a RAID data protection failure that has ended in substantial data loss, more often than not, somebody’s job is at stake if that data is not restored.

Instead of taking chances on your own data, call a data protection professional. RAID data protection can be expensive, but in most cases it is much less expensive than trying to redo the data that has been lost. There are a number of procedures that most protection professionals follow when it comes to doing any protection work. These procedures are executed and expanded when related with RAID data protection. The first step of any RAID data protection is to be sure that all of the drives are operating functionally. This may compose of taking any physically destroyed drives to the repair shop in order to make the important repairs so that they function properly again. Once that is done, the next step is to make complete, sector-by-sector duplicates of every drive. This is a very low-level process that lets the protecting technician do their work around bad sectors, and has complete control over how the drive operates. During the duplicating process, the original source drive that you gave is usually placed in a write protect mode, so that no details can be written to the drive. This makes sure that the original source data is not changed in any way.

Once the duplicating process is done, the original drives you sent in are set away to the side and are not touched anymore. The actual protecting process is done on the duplicate copies, so nothing that is done during protection that can make the situation worse. After the drives are duplicated, they will be placed into an emmulator and destriped. Destriping is like gathering the scattered pieces of a puzzle and putting them together in an orderly manner. Simply stated, destriping is gathering the data scattered among the numerous drives that make up the array and putting it onto a one destination drive. From here on, we have a one drive on which we can do what we would consider to be “normal” protection. We can do this process even at different levels. If the damage to the stripe is not too severe, in most cases a complete rebuilding of the directory structure and all related data can be done.

RAID data protection can be expensive. Depending on the company you consult, the prices can differ considerably. Various factors influence the cost, such as RAID kind, file system, total size, severity of failure, etc. The cost is considerable due to the amount of time and resources needed to do a single RAID data protection.