Although there are many Internet Service Providers that offer wonderful services at very reasonable prices there are still those among us who think it is a good idea to host their own website. Along with the many services that most, if not all reputable ISPs provide probably the single most important is the service of backing up all of your hard work, your web pages, your graphics, your text, all of that is backed up on a regular basis and can in fact be restored with a minimal amount of fuss and effort. In today’s world of high competition among internet providers, the pricing on a monthly basis for a good package can run as little as $15.00 per month. It is therefore a prudent decision to use an ISP instead of hosting the website yourself and ending up having to do Web Server Data Recovery.
The reason I am writing about this particular subject today is the fact that I received a phone call from a prospective client that hosted his own websites on his own server using a high speed business internet connection. As in all things analog the single weakest point in his plan finally stopped working; his hard drive. What I found interesting was that this guy was running his server on a forty (40) GB hard drive. This hard drive was running Microsoft Server 2008 and had all of his web data on it. It was not clear to me why he would trust his data on this type of system, but he paid the ultimate price when his hard drive inevitably crashed.
He would have to pay anywhere from $500.00 to $1200.00 to Web Server Data Recovery and get it back up and running.
This server was not raided and was in fact a single drive, and there seemed to be some type of surface degradation on the platters as indicated by another data recovery company. This company had offered to do the work for $500.00 but that was too high for him. After almost thirty minutes of talking to him I finally indicated that it might be just some bad sectors and these are the steps he should take in order to do Web Server Data Recovery.
- Create a Knoppix Live disk as a recovery environment
- When creating the Knoppix environment add dd_rescue to the package
- Find another forty GB hard drive to image the data to
- Use the Knoppix disk, and dd_rescue to transfer a full clone from the damaged drive to the new destination drive
- Mount the new hard drive in the current server
Hopefully these few steps are enough to get his sever back up and running. However, with bad sectors there is a high possibility that the file system is corrupt and is so damaged that it will not boot. There is the possibility of reloading the operating system but all of the configuring of his databases and interface handlers would be very time consuming. In the final analysis, this will cost the client time, money, and aggravation that could have easily been averted by spending $15.00 per month. In situations like this, it is never a matter of ‘if’ I will have a catastrophic incident but ‘when’ and $15.00 per month is not a good reason to tempt fate.
