RAID Recovery Tips

In case you are wondering, RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks," as it is an assembly of more than one hard drive in a single unit. The advantages of this are numerous, but the most important one is the fact that even if one of the hard drives has failed, the computer is still able to serve its purpose and perform all the tasks the user desires. The issue of data loss in this case is not so severe, as the multiple hard drives offer higher protection against accidental damaging the data.

So, why would you need RAID data recovery? Well, RAID is said to indeed protect your data when one of the hard drives fails, by increasing system uptime and network availability. Not to speak of the fact that more than one hard disk working together will significantly increase the performance of your system!

Generally speaking, RAID data recovery is most definitely the most complicated thing that a data recovery specialist or company can perform on a system. It is their mission to repair the damages that the user has done before taking the hard drives to the technician for recovery. Most of the clients of these data recovery firms attempt to recover the data or even repair the array of hard disks by using the system utilities they can get their hands on. This may be all right for the situation when the lost data is not critical to the company, but if these unprofessional methods fail, someone could loose his or her job! Therefore, in case of a RAID failure, the best thing one can do is take it to a data recovery company and let them do their jobs properly.

Even if the process of RAID data recovery can cost a lot of money, it is much better to have a specialists take it through the set procedure that the data recovery companies follow.

They start by ensuring that all the hard drives are functional, as this is a major factor in the success of the whole data recovery process. Only then they start making complete sector-by-sector clones of every drive, a process that takes place at a very low level and is not affected by the bad sectors.

Your initial hard drive is set to a write protect mode during this process, in order to make sure that your original data is not in danger of being modified in any way.

After cloning, your hard drives are no longer needed, as the recovery process is being done on these cloned copies. The clones of your hard drives are then put into a system and all the data scattered among the drives in the array will be put into an unique destination drive.

This is the point when a normal recovery process can start, as there is only one drive left!