Professional Data Recovery

I’ve often heard it said, “the RAID has been rebuilt – the data cannot be recovered” and often this is the case. With RAID5, if the configuration is changed, and new parity is calculated, then there will be a significant loss of any data that was previously stored on the RAID. As Hamlet so eloquently put [...]

Tivoli Storage Manager (“TSM”) provides a sophisticated heterogeneous data storage environment within which large volumes of data can be held. These might include email backups, user documents and SQL database, in fact all of the information that might be just a little bit useful in a computer forensic investigation or a tape data discovery exercise. So, [...]

(With apologies to Mark Twain) The release of LTO5 by Quantum Corporation brings 1.5TB native/3TB compressed tape to the market, and it is a sure fire bet that IBM and HP will shortly follow with their own offerings, which means that for the past 20 years or so, a technology many said was going the way [...]

When all the allocation information for a file is lost sometime the only way to recover the data is to trawl and scan every block of data looking for the remains. When Microsoft changed there Exchange data structure our job in data recovery got a whole lot harder.

The popularity of NAS RAID units has never been higher, but whilst RAID5 gives a high degree of reliance against the failure of any one disk in the NAS unit, other problems can result in data loss requiring data recover, and that could easily have been prevented by the implementation of a simple backup regime.

Thanks for the article. This is a great reminder that we have to be ready for anything in the field of computer forensics. Data exists in a variety of formats, some obsolete and some new and ever-changing. The fact that it was a TSM archive and not just a backup probably added even more complexity to the recovery. TSM is not the only vendor who is making recovery from backup media more difficult. Every enterprise storage management system seems to have their own way of managing backups and archives. The situation becomes even more challenging with the implementation of compression and hierarchical management schemes to more efficiently utilize media. Backup media will continue to be a challenge and the computer forensic community needs to be ready to deal with it.

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