Data Recovery of Flood Damaged Tape Cartridges
Quick response saves 23 Terabytes of data after flood.
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While many think of storm surges and gale force winds as the most destructive
elements of a hurricane, Floyd caused much more damage from inland flooding.
In a small east coast town, hundreds of homes, an AT&T switching station, and a
large corporate data center were engulfed with four feet of muddy water when a
local river spilled over its banks.
Unfortunately, communication to the site was difficult due to the flooding of the AT&T switching station across the street. All telephone, cellular phone, and pager services within 50 miles of the site were unreliable.
However, the eMag Recovery Team wasted no time. Within six hours of the initial phone call to eMag, an Emergency Response Team Member was on-site for evaluation of the damage.
The preliminary evaluation estimated that 15,000 tape cartridges were damaged by the water. eMag Team Members explained to data center management the urgency of treating the tape cartridges immediately. However, the customer was extremely hesitant about allowing the tapes to be taken off-site due to the critical nature of the data and asked eMag to send a team of specialists to prepare for on-site recovery.
PREPARING TO RESTORE 15,000 WATER-DAMAGED TAPE CARTRIDGES
In Dallas, eMag Services Operations prepared the necessary equipment for air shipment to the customer site. Simultaneously, the Technical Support Team from the eMag Recovery Site in Graham, Texas, arranged for an emergency tape shipment to the customer for same day-Saturday air delivery.
| MEDIATYPE | RECOVERED | RECOVERY RATE |
|---|---|---|
| 3480/3490e | 10.738 | 91.3% |
| 3590 | 244 | 98.3% |
In addition, three more team members were sent to the site to contribute their knowledge and expertise, including eMag's Research & Development Director from the United Kingdom. By Sunday night the team was complete and ready to move forward with the recovery. They quickly uncrated and arranged the required equipment, timing it so well that they were prepared to proceed when the electricity was finally restored to the site.
RECOVERING DATA ON-SITE AND OFF-SITE
Although the recovery team took only 24 hours to begin recovery, the submerged tapes had absorbed a large amount of water and were contaminated by silt and bacteria.
Fortunately for the data center, eMag Team Members were experienced with water damaged tapes and had just recently recovered data from a similar flood disaster in Spain involving 8,000 media cartridges. Therefore, the data recovery process for flooded tapes had already been perfected and was quickly applied to the tape cartridges in New Jersey. Throughout the next few days, the team recovered data from a small portion of tapes on-site, earning the respect and trust of the customer.
However, the level of contamination and sheer number of tapes required that the process be completed at eMag's Recovery Site where resources and personnel were available round the clock. The eMag team informed the customer that the process could be better served by moving the operation. With the customer's approval, the remaining 12,000 3480, 3490, 3590, and DLT cartridges were packaged in plastic-lined boxes for air shipment to Texas.
In Texas, the eMag team determined that each tape had absorbed nearly eight ounces of water. Most of the data recovery effort was focused on eliminating the water through a proprietary process that reconditions the tape and allows it to transfer data to eMag equipment. The process is extremely delicate and requires extensive knowledge of magnetic media and its properties.
GET THE BEST RESULTS WITH INDUSTRY EXPERTS
eMag's 30 years of media manufacturing experience proved to be play a key component in yet another successful recovery. eMag was able to dry, process, and copy approximately 1,500 tapes weekly. By the first of December, eMag had recovered nearly 92% of the tapes.
eMag Solutions is proud to have played an integral part of the total recovery process. From the start, eMag specialists were on hand to evaluate and determine the steps necessary for optimum data recovery. Over the next eight weeks, eMag's worldwide emergency response teams worked around the clock, manually recovering each data tape, though at times this process was painstaking and time consuming.
Based on the advanced compression algorithms used on some of the media (with up to 70 GB of data on some 3590 and DLT tapes), eMag estimates that over 23.28 terabytes of data was recovered from tapes that were once under water; an amazing recovery.