RAID, NAS and Hard Drive Data Recovery - Alandata Data Recovery
An industry leading innovator of data recovery, techniques, methods and programs
Alandata specializes in data recovery, with an emphasis in Linux, RAID and NAS storage devices. One thing that sets Alandata apart from most data recovery services is that Alandata is an innovator of data recovery, techniques, methods and programs. We don't just push buttons and run programs. We write our own programs. To do that you must have complete understandings of the inner workings of the target.
An example of this is our RAID recovery tool-set CopyRAID. This was one of the first tools specifically built for RAID recovery. Knowing the system and being able to create our own tools gives us the ability to recover where others fail.
Recently we received a 10x500gb RAID array - that's 5 terabytes of data. It had been to a major national data recovery company, ESS Data Recovery. After a month they returned it as unrecoverable. We went to work on it and analyzed it. It was a Linux file system and it appeared all the pieces were there - but it would never line-up properly.
We wrote special diagnostic routines to hunt down known markers. We determined it was a RAID-50. A RAID-50 is 2 RAID-5's blended together. What we discovered was the Intel RAID controller was flawed. It didn't write the data in any kind of normal pattern. It was corrupt but fixable. We then wrote special code to extract the data from the mutant raid and recovered 100% of the data, with names and paths. Perfect.
Another recent example was a successful recovery completed for IBM and a New York University Medical Center. This job was given to us, along with a competing international company, OnTrack Data Recovery. A 1.5 terabyte partition was accidentally reformatted and written over. While that is a partially recoverable situation, the file-system was a Linux GFS partition. A "Global File System" accessed by many servers cooperatively over a local network or even internet. It is so new, there are no recovery tools for it yet. So we analyzed and studied and developed the tools to recover it. We succeeded with 97% of the files recovered with names and paths. On Track data recovery failed.