Ontrack recovers 24TB of confidential data when two drives fail in RAID 6 array due to hardware malfunction.

A large UK company lost highly sensitive business critical data from one of its RAID 6 arrays when they replaced two failed drives but the system failed to rebuild.

The customer was using a RAID 6 array to run a range of business applications and had replaced two of the drives in the system (which had failed) with replacement drives. However, the system had failed to rebuild after the drive change, which meant that data was not accessible. The lost data was business critical and highly confidential information.

Unfortunately the customer’s RAID system had not been rebuilt or reconfigured when the new drives were added. As a result the missing data was still held on the two failed drives and had not been replicated on to the new drives.

The company approached Ontrack for help and provided all of the drives apart from the two failed drives. It chose to work with Ontrack on the basis of its technical track record and because it had security clearance for working with confidential data. It was also able to provide a cost-effective solution when compared with competitive quotes. Ontrack was able to complete the job in a shorter timeframe than other companies, achieving full data extraction within just two weeks compared to the three to four months quoted by competitors.

The two new drives did not contain any of the missing data as the system had not been rebuilt. However, working with a specialist toolset they were able to recover and rebuild all 24 terabytes of missing data from the RAID array within two weeks of development time.

The nature of the data meant that the engineers needed to restore the data without physically reading any of the files, making the job even more challenging. The fact that the customer was using a RAID 6 array helped the situation as it meant that the missing information was stored on other drives and could be restored.