RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 46

by William Van Winkle

I made a drastic mistake. Despite years of advising people to do the opposite, I'd somehow backed myself into a corner with having all of my personal audio content on one hard drive. That's everything: years of MP3 downloads, rips made from my CD collection before selling the discs, six years of interview recordings, the hospital recordings of my kids being born and their earliest sounds...everything. The data was priceless. And, of course, the drive failed.

I'd meant to back it up, sure, but I was low on drives for a while. I meant to set the drive in a mirrored RAID, but I'd run out of bays in my case and hadn't cleared up the hours necessary to overhaul my system. In short, I'd become the poster boy for every cautionary backup and storage story I'd ever written. One day, the drive was fine, the next it was slow, and the next it was inaccessible. You can fill in all my expletives delivered in a Hamlet-sized soliloquy yourself.

The upshot was that the drive still showed up as a logical volume in the system, so it wasn't entirely dead. Just how dead it was remained to be seen. First, I dredged up Norton Utilities, which chugged and chuffed and chewed on my drive and finally declared in Symantec's best approximation of a Magic 8 Ball: "Your drive's future is unclear. Try again later." Growing more desperate, I asked everybody I could think of for tips. Finally, a buddy over at Acronis mentioned a little application he'd heard recommended but never tried called R-Studio from R-tools Technology. I paid my $49.99 for the NTFS version, crossed my fingers, sacrificed a few memory modules to each of the major computing deities, and let it run. I don't really know what R-Studio does differently than Norton, but after nearly 24 nerve wracking hours of watching this program grind away on my audio drive, it declared that the mission was accomplished and only a few files and one folder could not be recovered. I browsed into the recovery folder, and—yes!—there were my audio files, thousands and thousands of them!

Of course, there were also scores of new folders with inscrutable names such as $$$Folder04960. Within these were mostly fragments from my audiobook collection. Worse yet, I discovered music album after music album that had files missing, and these files were nowhere to be found in the $$$ folders.

In the end, R-Studio's damage report was wildly wrong, but I did end up with over 95% of my audio files intact, and all of the irreplaceable family files were alive and well. I got my $50 worth and learned a valuable lesson once and for all. I now have no less than five fat Maxtor and Seagate external hard drives dangling from my main tower, all of which serve to back up the seven hard drives inside the case.

Not everybody does the smart thing. We all should run RAIDs. We all should use external backup. This was not my first drive failure, and I did have a secondary internal drive backing up mission critical work files. But I underestimated the importance of my personal, non-work data until it was in mortal jeopardy. As you might guess, I'm not alone. A towering number of PC users, probably the majority of them, fail to exercise sufficient data protection practices. The reasons are likely based on expense and time—not even time to run the backups since those are usually automated, but just the time to take down a system and install the backup hardware and applications.

We all should run RAIDs. We all should use external backup. I did have a secondary internal drive backing up mission critical work files, but I underestimated the importance of my personal, non-work data until it was in mortal jeopardy.

And this is why the world has data recovery products. The trouble with R-Studio is that it's not a channel play. You can be a nice person and recommend it to your clients in their time of need, but friendly advise doesn't pay the bills, and I'm not so sure that R-Studio is the best product for the job.

After my audio drive debacle, I saw Ontrack's name pop up in an article, and I realized the thought had never even entered my mind to send the drive to the company. Ontrack has been the top name in drive disaster recovery for many years, but I'm used to thinking of Ontrack services costing thousands of dollars in forensic settings where data has to be scraped off of the sides of drive tracks because some perpetrator tried to wipe the disk as cops were pulling up outside. Out of curiosity, because I hadn't visited it in a long time, I hopped onto Ontrack's site and realized that Ontrack has been expanding its portfolio of services and products for many years. I didn't realize that Ontrack had acquired Mijenix and now has its own Norton-like system utilities suite. I had no idea that Ontrack has a recovery application called EasyRecovery Professional that sells for 10 times the price of R-Studio. It probably does a better job than R-Studio, but how much better? Dunno. I wish I'd been able to run EasyRecovery right after running R-Studio so I could compare them, but that's life. I'm not going to sabotage a drive just to satisfy my curiosity.

Also news to me was that Ontrack is actually a very good channel play, so I called the company and talked with Jim Reinert, senior director of software and services, who told me that Ontrack's Partner Program sports over 20,000 members around the world. They offer partners collateral, education, and such, but the real benefit of membership is being able to derive revenue from offering rescue services to your clients.

What rescue services? Obviously, lab work is still core at Ontrack, and you can send in practically any type of hard drive or storage media to Ontrack for analysis and recovery. But most intriguing is the company's recent online recovery service.

"Remote is great for things like servers," said Reinert, "where maybe one volume is down but the server itself is still running. This is also the fastest method because you don't have to ship anything anywhere, and a lot of times we can make the repairs right in place. The customer would just download our free client for remote data recovery. An engineer on our end connects to the system via a VPN with this software and uses our tools to either repair the data right on the volume or, in more severe cases, copy files out to another location. Either way, it's very fast and powerful for RAID recoveries or server volumes and so on."

No doubt, Remote Data Recovery would have done an excellent job on my audio hard drive since there was no physical damage. (One repartitioning later, the drive still works just fine.) But would it have been worth the price of admission? Ontrack charges $100 for a "VeriFile" report, essentially a diagnostic scan and analysis of what files on a damaged disk are good, repairable, and partial. Partial files are typically ones where physical damage to the platter only leaves some of a file intact. Once the analysis is completed within 24 to 48 hours, the customer gets a firm quote on a restoration operation. According to Reinert, a typical Windows laptop drive costs $1,000 to recover. Yes, that's three zeros. When I gagged on this, Reinert explained further.

"Off the shelf software can handle simple things. Where we come in is data loss because of hardware failure. There's the quality of the recovery, and the report we offer is a large part of the value proposition. Also, with low-end recovery software, the application has to make a lot of decisions on its own. We have actual trained engineers involved throughout the recovery process making those decisions."

OK, I buy that. I obviously don't have the tools or knowledge to make a good recovery, and if the data really is priceless (one Gallup poll determined that "most businesses value 100 megabytes of data at $1 million"), dropping a grand on retrieval is no big thing. Servers, by the way, run into the multiple thousands of dollars for recovery.

You might question: Why wouldn't someone willing to pay $1,000 to recover a drive have real-time data backup already in place? He might. But a blown power supply might take out both a primary drive as well as its mirror. Backup sessions can be corrupt, and there are lots of users who, to save time, don't run a verify check on their data. In the case of laptops, say a user pays $10,000 for a client list, loads it on his notebook, and the notebook hard drive fails before he gets back to the office.

There are many cases where reasonable diligence simply isn't good enough. According to Ontrack data obtained from actual repaired drives, 59% of data loss is caused by hardware failure (not necessarily failure of the hard disk) and another 26% by human error. In contrast, the perennial scapegoat for drive failures, viruses, accounts for only 4 percent. Six percent of all PCs will suffer a data loss episode in any given year. Failures in cases where diligence was taken to safeguard against data loss might only be rare occurrences, but even rarities aggregated from a broad enough user pool can add up into a lucrative recovery business.

Some of these rarities may be your customers, and Ontrack's proposition to partners is simple.

"If you want to manage your customer and have us do the data recovery in the background," said Reinert, " then you can be totally involved in the billing, we'll charge you a 15% discount, then you can mark up the recovery to whatever you want. Or if you want to stay out of the billing process, you can just refer the customer to us and we'll cut you back a check for 10 percent at the completion of that recovery job."

Easy enough. Say a remote recovery job comes to $1,500. If you keep Ontrack's standard margin, your customer is likely to have a full recovery within days when he thought his data was lost forever, and you get to bill $225 for doing more or less nothing. Plus the odds are good you'll be able to circle back when the dust settles and sell that client on a more robust data backup solution.

Ontrack is the best name in the recovery business, and you have nothing to lose by hooking up with the company and having the info your customers may need to use its services if and when the time comes. Don't let your clients be like me and learn about the advantages of Ontrack too late.