Disaster Recovery
Specifically to those situations when any of the following have happened:
- You have deleted important files
- You have formatted your drive
- A new installation of a product stops the rest of your computer from functioning
- Hard Drive Crashed and stopped functioning
- Computer Crashed and stopped functioning
- You cannot get your computer to start up
- You cannot get the Operating System to function properly
These are all serious situations and require IMMEDIATE attention.
Here are the appropriate steps to be done:
Stop everything - now!
As soon as you realize that you have an error. Stop all activity on that computer. If it is your desktop computer, then stop whatever you are doing and just let the computer sit there and idle.
If it is a server then contact the system administrator and inform of what happened immediately. This is not a time to have a pride issue and attempt to recover something on your own. Especially if you aren't sure of what to do. That is exactly when you know that you need help. Get it!
The system administrator, depending on the type of program being used and the type of data involved will have different options available to him.
Databases will allow for a variety of rollback and recovery scenarios that an experienced DBA will be able to work through.
Deletion of a file may just require the recovery from a back up file. After that you will have to re-enter all the information since the time of the backup. So if the file was deleted at 9:00 a.m. and the last backup was at 12:00 a.m. that morning, you will just have to recover the information from the start of the day until 9:00 a.m.
Deletion of a file on a Windows computer (desktop or server) allows for a few more options since the information actually still resides on the computer (unless someone over-wrote it which is why you stop doing all work immediately when you realize that you have a problem). The information that is deleted is in the computers FAT table. File Allocation Tables are maintained one way or another on all Windows machines as a kind of phone book for your hard drive. When you say that you want to access a certain spreadsheet file, like Contacts.xls the Excel Spreadsheet program actually goes to the File Allocation Table and looks up its address on the hard drive. Remember that today's hard drives are getting up close to the 100 gig mark, which means 100,000,000,000 bytes of information. You don't want to just start shuffling through the hard drive looking for the right idea. It's like driving through Edmonton looking for a house with a certain phone number. It could be done, but it would take forever. So we look it up. And that is what is erased when you delete something. And there are programs out there that will allow you to recover 'deleted' files. Really!
Formatting of a hard drive is also accomplishing the same thing, although it is a lot more drastic in approach. The chances of recovery on this not as good as a simple deletion, but there are still programs out there that can help you through this.
In the case of a newly installed software program that seems to crash your hard drive, there are several things that can be done, both before and after the installation that will help you. So hopefully you are reading this before you need to be calling for help!
Depending also on what operating system you are working with, variations exist here also. With Windows 98/ME/NT/2000 or Unix, you will want to do a few things before any installation. A full registry export is always recommended. A full backup of your operating system drive (C:) is also recommended. Did I mention that you should have your hard drive partitioned into a minimum of 2 drives, preferably 3 drives? Drive C should be your operating system and nothing else. Drive D would typically be your program drive, where all the software that you install would go. And Drive E would be your working files, all those word documents, excel spreadsheet, GIFs, JPEG's and email files that you create and work on. The benefit of this is that it is much easier to do backups with partitioned drives, a backup of your operating system is really only about 3 gigs in size, but if you have everything on one drive, then it might go on for gigs and gigs and gigs, especially if you have started downloading mp3 files off the Internet.
Back to the subject at hand though, a backup of your operating system drive is a good thing.
If you are in XP then you have a system restore option that you can utilize. What happens is that if you have an installation that goes badly for whatever reason, but generally because two programs conflict with each other, then you can back out of the installation by going to the previous system restore point and have the computer put back to that point in time condition. A good thing. I would also recommend a registry export and a backup still, just to be safe. A good backup can successfully counter human stupidity. Usually.
Now if the hard drive crashes and dies, this is a very bad thing. Right up there with the computer just stopping, which is similar but not necessarily the same thing. A hard drive crash is a physical disaster. Typically you are going to have to buy a new hard drive and hopefully get all the information off your dead hard drive on to the new hard drive. but it is a dead drive, isn't it? The answer to that one is a qualified yes. If you ever saw the movie Princess Bride you will understand that someone can be mostly dead. But not totally. And of course, we know that it is true love that can only bring someone mostly dead back to life. So contact a geeky person who loves computer and they will probably understand what true love means to a dead hard drive and be able to help you. There are means of getting information off a dead hard drive. But they are one time shots and the ways that are utilized are strange to say the least (do you have a freezer at work?).
Now if you computer just won't start up, or if it crashes unexpectedly, this is not the end of the world. Or of your hard drive necessarily. This may be a glitch in your computer. Don't ask me why it happens, or what actually happens, but computers glitch. They weren't built to glitch, as far as I know, but they do. Consider that most desktop computers these days are built to handle around 3-4 billion instructions per second. How many are you good for in one second? These guys are handling in the billions. Now, what if ten or twenty of those little instructions got twisted around a little bit by an electrical power surge or slump having the net effect of changing that string of zeroes and ones to a different combination of zeroes and ones, so now instead of looking like 11100011101010101 they look like 11100000000000101 instead. Not a big difference, but it might be enough to screw up a program and end your computers ability to function today. Most of the time when little glitches like that happen, the program will simply re-request the information back, but they don't always catch it.
What do you do when this happens? Sometimes you can get around it by simply re-installing the operating system software on top of itself again. The more current your copy of Windows is, the more likely this will come off successfully.
Other times you are going to have to reformat and reinstall the operating system. Now, if you had your operating system installed in a separate drive apart from all your program and working files this would turn out very well. Allow me to explain. Even if you had to reinstall your operating system, and then reinstall your program files, what happens is that most, if not all, program that are installing themselves will not override their existing settings. So if you installed a product in the directory XXX and now with the new operating system installation reinstall the same product to the same directory, there are going to be the same files already there. So the program will go through and generally update the fixed program files but leave all the files that have your personal settings and preferences alone. Very nice! But the program files have to be on a different drive than your operating system for this to work. It also means that your working files (word documents and excel spreadsheets) will also be spared a format if they are on a different drive.
If you cannot get the Operating System to function properly, then the solution above may be the one that you need. It may also be that you need to re-import a registry file to file to correct the problem. But only if you imported registry file is current. A file from a week ago is not current. A file from yesterday may not necessarily be current. This is a tricky judgment call.
It maybe that you just need to get your system tuned up. This requires someone who understands how Windows operates, how the registry works and all the other little policy and services applications that make Windows what it is today. You'll want to call in help for this.
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