12 April 2012

Most professional data recovery companies already have established recovery procedures for a large variety of problems. These procedures allow them to recover the majority of the data from their drives.

But what about the bits of data that were missed or recovered corrupted? How do they impact the final outcome of the recovery?

In today’s world, with “no data = no fee” policies being the standard, it is the clients who decide the outcome of a recovery. They could say that critical data is missing and they cannot accept the recovery. They could even return after the recovery has been completed, claiming that they are missing something and asking for a secondary recovery.

Unfortunately, this is a poor position for a data recovery company, because the result of its hard labour is out of its control. We hear all sorts of laments along these lines:

• “But the customer didn’t tell me exactly what files she wanted recovered! How was I supposed to know what to look for? And how can I prove that the job is done?”
• “He said he was looking for a certain file in a certain folder, but it’s not there. Now I have to contact the customer and spend more time trying to figure out what he wants. Honestly, for some jobs, I spend more time on operations than on data recovery.”
• “The customer received the data and says that some critical files are missing or corrupted. Now I have to do a rework because of miscommunication. There goes my profit on this job.”

A better approach is that the terms of the recovery are fully defined before the recovery process starts. The client clearly identifies the files that must be recovered, and after the recovery process is completed, the integrity of those files is firmly verified in order to leave less room for rejection, customer dissatisfaction, and secondary recoveries. Clearly defining the scope of the work, correctly verifying the integrity of recovered data, and effectively communicating this information to clients remain the top business problems of professional data recovery companies worldwide.

Many tools on the market attempt to validate the integrity of files by checking their logical structure for corruption after the imaging/recovery process is complete. However, such methods can never be precise, since they essentially take an educated guess based on various logical data points, such as file headers. Thus, files “verified” by these processes can still easily be corrupted and unusable or have missing/incorrect data within them.

Most DR service providers currently do verification by allowing the client to try opening the recovered files. This process is inconvenient because the client must be physically present, and all relevant applications must be installed on the computer where the client will try opening his files. Also, in most of the cases it’s impossible to verify all recovered files due to time limitations, leaving the problem unresolved.

Integrating the imaging and file verification processes yields a much more concrete method of file verification. This way, the sectors that were not successfully read can be tied to specific files, immediately showing which files may be corrupted. The level of corruption within those files can also be estimated by looking at the number of corrupted or unread sectors within each file.

After determining the integrity status of all files comes the task of communicating this information to the client. This step is quite easy to do when dealing with a small number of files, and rather complex when we begin working with thousands of files with varying corruption levels. The most efficient way of communicating is right through the clients’ web browsers, giving them the ability to browse through their files. They also have easy access to the integrity status of each recovered file to make sure they understand precisely what they are receiving. Clear and efficient communication leaves less room for client misunderstandings, disappointments, and possible claims.

DeepSpar Operations Server together with DeepSpar Disk Imager allow for all of these best practices to be implemented right in the recovery process, resolving these problems and professionalizing and automating client management processes for data recovery businesses.