There is never a good time for a computer crash, but it was particularly horrifying for the Digital Journal.
The Toronto-based small business had just stopped publishing a quarterly magazine about digital culture to throw all its resources into its citizen-journalism website when its backup crashed. Digital Journal had bought its own state-of-the-art server. It installed extensive backup.
What could possibly go wrong?
In a short time, the main drive and the secondary drive both failed. Worse, the backup process continued, overwriting two other backup drives with the errors of the first two backup drives.
Chris Hogg of digitaljournal.com got help from CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc. when both the company’s drives failed simultaneously. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)
The odds against two drives failing simultaneously are astronomical. But it happened. Digital Journal editor Chris Hogg had no choice but to dig deep into the company's pockets, and go to a data-recovery specialist.
“You don't know how valuable your data is until you've lost it,” he says.
CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc., a Markham, Ont.-based company, has calmed many panicked people like Mr. Hogg. CBL had all of Digital Journal's software and data back up and running within four days.
It was one of many routine rescues for CBL since 1993, when William Margeson and Zhengong Chang co-founded the company.
CBL has a rogue's gallery of dead drives, and pride of place goes to one fire-damaged unit that looked like a forgotten pot roast. But the platters inside the sealed drive were fine. They were taken out in a “clean room,” remounted with a new motor and head (the part that reads the data), and sent to technicians who located and rescued the data on it with their own software.
In Mr. Hogg's case, the recovery was total. When his drives were fixed, the system picked up exactly where it had left off four days earlier. Still, Digital Journal had suffered an unexpected four-day holiday.
“Hard drives are becoming more reliable these days,” said Tim Margeson, son of the co-founder and CBL's general manager, “but there are more drives in play. Five years ago, manufacturers shipped 200 million drives a year. Now, it's 400 million.”
Matthew Kanas, who works in the Toronto offices of Maverick Public Relations, experienced a similar problem, but for him it was personal. He bought an external backup system made by a California company that makes enclosures for hard drives and sells them as backup units. Mr. Kanas bought his at a major retail outlet, and used it to back up five years of collected photos, music and documents.
He checked the drive, and the backup had been successful, so he proceeded to reformat his computer's hard drive. But when he went to recover his 10,000 photos, the drive emitted a clicking noise. Clicking always means a disaster.
He says the California company did not respond to his phone calls and e-mails for weeks. The company did not make the drive, just the enclosure.
Weeks passed. Eventually, the company responded, telling Mr. Kanas that the lost data is his problem, and they would replace the drive. But to do that, Mr. Kanas had to go through the retailer, which said he had waited too long, and the replacement period had expired.
He went to the Toronto offices of a U.S.-based company called Ontrack Data Recovery, which he chose because their rates were good and Ontrack operations manager John Riddell was nice on the phone. Mr. Kanas ended up paying $1,300 to recover the data. The final cost, taxes in, was about $2,000, not counting his original purchase price.
“What's the dollar value of photos?” he asked himself. “Do I love five years' worth of photos that much?”
Well, he does. And now he has his irreplaceable courtship pictures back.
CBL's office shows the sad wreckage of failed technology. In a large room, a dozen technicians study monitors showing images only a geek can love. The numbers go slowly by, showing data being recovered bit by bit. The time it takes to recover the drives depends on the extent of the damage, the size of the disk, and how busy the recovery company is. The average process runs one to four days.
On a rack along one wall are new drives — CBL places the recovered data on them — and near the clean room another rack carries the corpses of drives already recovered.
“It's not a matter of if data-loss disaster will strike,” the senior Mr. Margeson likes to say. “It's a matter of when.”
California-based Strategic Research Corp. counts three main causes of data loss: hardware failure (44 per cent), human error (32 per cent) and software failure (14 per cent). Virus attacks (7 per cent) and natural disasters (3 per cent) account for the rest.
“Data storage media can be extremely resilient and retain digital information despite considerable physical damage,” Mr. Margeson says. “But backups do fail.”
IDC, a U.S.-based research firm, recently reported that large businesses with IT departments handle data disasters better than small businesses, which have few or no skilled IT workers. IDC also predicted that in 2007, the volume of information created and replicated should surpass the capacity available to back it up. And when drives are overworked, they fail sooner.
IDC also said that about 70 per cent of small businesses go under within a year of a major loss of data. If only 1 per cent of all the hard drives in the world's estimated one billion personal computers fail, IDC estimates, then 10 million drives will fail this year alone. Statistically, all backup systems will eventually fail.
Over at Ontrack Data Recovery, technician Anick Silencieux is carefully taking apart a stricken drive in one of Ontrack's 17 clean rooms in 19 countries. The Canadian operation opened in 2005 and employs only five people, but is aggressive in its turnaround speed — Mr. Riddell, the operations manager, says he can average two to three days to fix a disk, and do it in 48 hours in an emergency. And the new drive with the recovered data comes free.
Last year, he says Ontrack performed about 50,000 recoveries, and returned four petabytes — or one trillion kilobytes — to their owners.
“We don't see any way to make drives better,” he said. “So you can't have too many backups.”
