After working with the client to assess the data loss and prioritize the data that needed recovering, it was determined that the hard drives in both systems needed to be processed simultaneously. All the hard drives were picked up by Ontrack and delivered to the data recovery lab in Boblingen, Germany.
Upon arrival, the hard drives were initially processed in a cleanroom environment to safely remove dirt and inspect the full extent of the damage. The data on each hard drive and its server location were also documented at this time.
Fortunately, the drives in the SAN had no mechanical problems and could be read properly. However, some of the drives from the backup server were faulty and these had to be processed further in the cleanroom in order to extract copies of the data.
The SAN data recovery was very complex, as the water damage interrupted the connection to the VMware ESX Server and the power supply while in operation. This meant that the mapping links to the EqualLogic SAN and the LUNs in the VMFS datastores (as well as the Oracle database and other files) were heavily corrupted.
To perform the recovery, Ontrack’s proprietary data recovery software tools were required to reconstruct the system and the file structures in order to get to the actual files. However, reassembling the Dell backup server was relatively easy since it hardly experienced any data corruption.